Blood and Oil, page 16
Kushner argued that the White House should give the Saudis the opportunity to deliver, and Trump staffers set up a call between the new president and King Salman.
“I’m a great admirer of you, Mr. President,” Salman said.
“Okay, King,” Trump responded. He said he would put Kushner, his son-in-law, in charge of organizing the trip. Salman responded that he had tasked Mohammed with taking care of the Saudi end and offered the former reality TV star a flattering flourish. “If you don’t think he’s doing a good job,” Salman said, “you can tell him, ‘You’re fired!’”
Kushner and Mohammed began communicating, sometimes via WhatsApp messages, and got along well. Kushner liked Mohammed’s explanation that he wasn’t trying to modernize Saudi Islam; he was actually trying to restore it to its more moderate roots. Mohammed had explained to many foreign politicians and journalists that Saudi Arabia had been on the road toward a more liberal society until a 1979 terrorist attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca prompted the Al Saud to cede power to conservative religious elements.
In fact this was an oversimplification: The Al Saud had come to power through their alliance with Wahhabist fighters, and the political descendants of those fighters were the kingdom’s religious establishment.
But Mohammed gave Kushner confidence that he was a new kind of prince, one who understood the importance of the world of money and technology and wasn’t interested in age-old grievances. In comparison, MBN seemed stodgy and change averse.
Facing doubt from Tillerson and members of the political establishment, Kushner called Mohammed and told him he wanted all the Saudi promises surrounding the trip put in writing. The prince responded by sending Aiban, the security official, to Washington for several weeks. In meetings over that period, he and Kushner worked through the US requests and the Saudi promises and put them all in writing. Once Aiban returned to Riyadh, Mohammed told his well-organized group of deputies to start planning a series of lavish public ceremonies. In Washington, Kushner didn’t move as quickly.
In February, a cherub-faced former presidential advance man named Steve Atkiss got a surprising call from the White House. “It looks like the president’s first trip overseas may be to Saudi,” an aide named Joe Hagin told Atkiss, a former colleague. “No one here has any knowledge of how to plan a trip, and no one has any knowledge of Saudi.”
Atkiss offered to help. He had planned a trip to the kingdom for George W. Bush and accompanied the then-president to Riyadh. He was also along for a visit King Abdullah made to Bush’s Texas ranch. Atkiss said he’d work for the Trump White House as a volunteer—it was an opportunity to help Hagin, an old friend, and wouldn’t be bad for his consultancy, Command Group. He had a meeting with Kushner and began reaching out to his Saudi planning counterparts.
A few weeks later, Mohammed bin Salman came to Washington to meet Pentagon officials in his capacity as Saudi defense minister. He arranged a brief sit-down with Trump that turned into seven hours of lunch and conversations after German chancellor Angela Merkel had to cancel a planned White House appearance due to a snowstorm.
The press photos of Mohammed with Trump sent a signal back home. MBN, the crown prince, wasn’t on the trip. Mohammed, who was supposedly his deputy, was forging a new alliance with America.
What Mohammed found was encouraging. In his first trip to the White House without the skeptical Obama administration crowd, he received a much warmer reception, especially when he criticized Obama. The big problem with the former president, Mohammed told Trump, was that he had a fundamentally flawed view of the Middle East. He wanted to empower Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood and to cut Saudi Arabia out of the mix. And Trump nemesis Hillary Clinton, Obama’s first secretary of state, had been disrespectful to Saudi Arabia, Mohammed said.
In the weeks after that meeting, Mohammed would understand he was dealing with a much more receptive, and pliant, White House than any the Saudis had previously seen. And compared to his own operation, he would realize, the Trump White House was extremely disorganized. That would play to Mohammed’s advantage.
Once trip dates were finalized, Mohammed’s staffers began working day and night to carry out the prince’s plans to host the trip. He wanted to fly in top chefs, and his staffers arranged that. He wanted Trump and King Salman to hold a public ceremony to sign commercial deals so that Trump could take credit for bringing in billions of dollars of Saudi spending.
To show Trump that he—not MBN—was the most fervent fighter of terrorism in the Saudi government, Mohammed brought engineers and a construction crew to a decrepit Royal Court hotel and had them turn the lobby into a Battlestar Galactica–style “war room” for a new anti-extremism center under Mohammed’s control. He even brought David Petraeus to see it while construction was underway. It seemed potentially impressive, though somewhat redundant since MBN had been working for years on anti-extremism programs. As later became clear, it was more a made-for-TV set for world leaders to convene on than an indicator of any kind of significant shift in Saudi priorities.
And to show Trump that Saudi Arabia loves America, Mohammed had staff arrange for performers like the Harlem Globetrotters to be in Riyadh when Trump arrived. Flying in celebrities from a visiting leader’s own country was an unconventional strategy, but Mohammed figured it might appeal to Trump’s apparent unease with anything too exotic.
The Americans, on the other hand, seemed to have no such detailed vision. The day-to-day life of the Trump White House was America’s greatest soap opera, complete with rumors of ill-fated romances, firings, and polarizing policies, such as building a wall on the Mexican border. Kushner and Bannon were in the middle of it, but they knew that they wanted the Saudi visit to happen right away—and that they, not the “deep state,” had to control it. As far as Trump’s closest advisors were concerned, there was no such thing as a government staffer who existed to carry out the president’s orders—the longtime staff, they suspected, were liberal ideologues who would undermine the Trump agenda.
So Kushner and a deputy national security advisor named Dina Powell took on lead roles in the planning. An Egyptian-born, Arabic-speaking former Goldman Sachs banker and George W. Bush aide, Powell was seen in the White House as a bridge to the Middle East.
Powell and Kushner sat down with Atkiss, the ex-presidential advance man, to start arranging logistics. He was set to depart for Riyadh the next day and needed instructions. One priority, after safety and working out logistical kinks, was making sure the president wasn’t put in any embarrassing situations.
As a longtime advance man—someone who prepares the groundwork for the massive moveable circus that is a presidential entourage—Atkiss had a seemingly clear role. The White House and its commercial, military, diplomatic, and security people would come up with a detailed list of plans, and he would go to Riyadh ahead of time to arrange logistics, assess risk, and work out whatever details were necessary to carry out the White House’s instructions and make sure the trip went safely and smoothly.
But Powell and Kushner gave vague instructions in their White House meeting. They basically just provided a list of things the president and the Saudis wanted to do, including the ceremony to sign US-Saudi business deals. How long would the ceremony be? They didn’t know. An hour-long meeting would present different security concerns than a ten-minute sit-down. What deals would be signed? Who had to be brought in for the meeting? Did the CEO of Boeing need to be flown in? The chairman of GE?
“Hmm, I don’t know,” Kushner responded. “Who’s the keeper of the list?” He, Powell, and Atkiss stared blankly at one another. “Could you be?” Kushner asked Atkiss.
It was a strange request of a volunteer, since lists of attendees on an official visit are typically kept by the National Security Council. But this was the White House asking, and Atkiss agreed to do it. When he arrived in Riyadh, he went to the fortresslike US embassy and sat down with staffers there to discuss. “It’s on us to come up with a list of every possible deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia that could be signed at this event,” Atkiss told them.
There were other awkward requests from the Royal Court. The Saudis, for example, wanted to gather leaders from most of the world’s Muslim countries in a room to meet Trump. This had the makings of a debacle. Trump was brand-new in the presidency and couldn’t be expected to know much about the fifty-plus heads of state who would likely be there. Was it really a good idea to put an inexperienced president in a room with the leaders of Turkmenistan and Burkina Faso, Jordan and Mauritania and just hope for the best?
“The Saudis want to do it,” Kushner responded. The idea was greenlit. So was a Saudi plan for King Salman to place a medal in the shape of a collar around Trump’s neck, a request that concerned some White House staffers because Trump doesn’t like being touched by strangers.
Atkiss checked into the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton with plenty of busy work to do—making sure Donald and Melania Trump got the separate suites they requested, for example, and figuring out where the emergency exits were in each meeting place.
On his first morning, Atkiss dialed into a video conference that would start a monthlong cycle in the tradition of Groundhog Day. On his screen were Powell and Kushner, the point people for the White House. They asked questions about meetings and logistics. Then Atkiss made his one major query: “Who’s working on the list?” He needed to know what business deals Trump and the king were going to sign. He’d given the embassy-generated list to Kushner and Powell to review. “Where are we on the list?”
“I don’t have it,” Kushner said.
Each day, for another nineteen days, Atkiss would ask the same question. And each day, he would receive a similar response. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the delays. Kushner and Powell were both working on multiple priorities, and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose office also had a role reviewing the deals, didn’t seem engaged.
Atkiss had no such trouble getting much more specific direction from his Saudi contacts. During daily meetings, Aiban or another of the government officials working on the trip would brief Atkiss on a detailed plan and ask for US feedback. Sometimes MBS’s younger brother Khalid would come to meetings, and the older ministers would all defer to the soon-to-be ambassador to the United States, waiting for him to speak. Breakfasts and dinners and tours for the president were scheduled. A princess arranged to take Melania around Riyadh.
At the king’s executive office, a grand white building in the modern Islamic style called the Royal Diwan, workers removed each cobblestone in the driveway surrounding an immaculate grass courtyard and laid it back down, ensuring the path was perfectly smooth. One day the king’s head of protocol, Khalid al-Abad, brought Atkiss to scope out Ibn Saud’s old fortress Al Murabba, which is now a museum. They did a walkthrough of the tour Trump would take of the renovated mud-walled building. Abad showed him the entrances, exits, and security checkpoints. “And here,” he said as they entered a museum gallery, “we will have Toby Keith.”
Atkiss paused. The country star who sang “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way” to would-be terrorists after 9/11 seemed like a strange person to bring to Riyadh. But in his enthusiasm to embrace America, Mohammed had his underlings offer several million dollars for the singer—who had performed at Trump’s preinaugural celebration—to drop everything and surprise the president in Ibn Saud’s former home.
Late at night, Mohammed’s deputies would call Atkiss, passing on inquiries directly from the prince. And during the day, Atkiss would keep working out the details and pestering the White House to give him the list of agreements. A few days before the trip, Aiban asked once again for the list of business deals. Atkiss promised he wouldn’t come back to Aiban until he had the list.
On May 18, two days before the trip, Atkiss logged onto his final video conference with the White House. “Let’s go over the schedule,” Kushner said.
“No,” Atkiss said. “We’re not going to go through the schedule.” He had promised the Saudis he would have the list of deals, and he needed it right away.
Kushner looked at him awkwardly.
“Steve,” Kushner said softly, “we’re just not going to be able to do it. You have to do it.”
That meant a volunteer was in charge of figuring out which multi-billion-dollar agreements the president of the United States and the king of Saudi Arabia would sign.
A surprised Atkiss rushed to the US embassy and, together with a career foreign service official named John Godfrey, reviewed seventy-some potential deals the officials had earlier put together. They divided them into categories—bilateral agreements, commercial deals, and military sales—and picked out the ones that sounded best. They ended up with a list of nearly a half trillion dollars’ worth of deals for weaponry, nuclear plants, and other strategically important projects.
The Saudis were speaking Trump’s language.
Chapter 9
Golden Gambit
May 2017
Donald Trump couldn’t have been more pleased when he arrived at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton on May 20, 2017, to find a fifty-foot-tall projection of his own face staring sternly at him from the palatial hotel’s sandstone facade. Next to his giant visage was that of a gently smiling King Salman, with a pair of hands clasped in the middle. Billboards around the city trumpeted, “Together We Prevail,” with their images side by side. American and Saudi flags hung all over the place.
It was Trump’s first foreign visit as president, and the Saudis were treating him like a king. Mohammed had carefully orchestrated the Ritz arrival, along with every other aspect of the visit. The prince knew just how to deal with Trump. He’d grown up in an extended family dominated by striving, geriatric princes who were terrified of humiliation, desperate for respect, and obsessed with adding to their inherited wealth. And Mohammed had learned to ingratiate himself with those fragile, old men. Until his father became king, making himself indispensable to them was the only way to gain power in the Royal Court. Now he had to do the same with an American version.
Bringing Trump to Riyadh would be the most prominent step yet in Mohammed’s march toward the Saudi throne. Over that time, the prince had built the fortune his father Salman needed to become king. He had outflanked would-be usurpers to ensure Salman inherited Abdullah’s crown. And he had gained control of the Saudi military and the economy, sidelining cousin and rival Mohammed bin Nayef. After all that, he had proclaimed that the kingdom would no longer squander its oil money on maintaining the brittle status quo. And of course he was now rich beyond belief.
Now he was bringing the US president to Saudi Arabia for his first foreign visit. This sent a message at home and abroad that Mohammed had the support of the world’s most powerful country. And it showed his family that he could do what Tony Pfaff, who had served as a Middle East–focused military advisor to the State Department and on the National Security Council, calls “kingly things.”
Mohammed was barely thirty-one years old. With his path to the throne blocked by the much older Mohammed bin Nayef, “establishing legitimacy to the Saudi throne” required public displays of leadership, says Pfaff, who is now a professor at the US Army War College. Things like bombing Yemen and promising economic renewal helped, but none was more important than proving he could be the man to revitalize the strained US-Saudi relationship.
The visit to Riyadh, part of a three-city journey through religious centers that continued on to Israel and the Vatican, wasn’t Trump’s first trip to the Gulf. He’d visited Dubai, where a developer bought the rights to use his name on a residential golf course real estate project that went up for sale in 2014. And while he had never traveled to Saudi Arabia, he’d had a number of run-ins with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, during his career.
Trump attended a White House dinner with King Fahd in February 1985, hobnobbing with princes including Saud bin Faisal and Bandar bin Sultan, the US ambassador at the time. During the same period, one of Osama bin Laden’s half brothers, Shafiq, lived in Trump Tower a few floors below Trump himself.
Trump subsequently struck up a relationship with Salem bin Laden, a scion of Binladin Group, that led to Trump’s sending a team to Riyadh to consider helping build a luxury project there. He had one strange requirement: The bin Ladens must pay him $10,000 to conduct the study. He told them that he liked to require such a payment to ensure his business partners actually read the proposal.
Even in those days, he had strong views about the US alliance with the Gulf states, telling Playboy that “the Saudis, the Kuwaitis walk all over us” and that Arabs spent a lot of money in his casinos. “They lose a million, two million at the tables and they’re so happy because they had such a great weekend,” he said. “If you lost a million dollars, you’d be sick for the rest of your life, maybe. They write me letters telling me what a wonderful time they had.”
He sold the Plaza Hotel to a group of investors including Alwaleed bin Talal in 1995. Three years later, he bought a $30 million yacht from Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer, once one of the richest men on earth, and uncle of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It famously included a discotheque with laser beams that projected Khashoggi’s face on the ceiling and an operating room complete with a morgue. Trump renamed it the Trump Princess.
King Salman was on the tarmac to greet the president when Air Force One taxied in at 10 a.m. The festivities began immediately, with a tea ceremony in the royal airport terminal. Trump was wearing a dark suit with a bright blue tie dangling far below his waist, and Melania wore a black jumpsuit with a gargantuan golden buckle and belt and a matching gold necklace.
