Blood and Oil, page 27
But Mohammed believed that was absurd, and unafraid of blowback for ordering many of the strictest among them locked up or fired, he told Badr bin Farhan to focus his efforts on turning al-Ula into a cultural oasis with stunning scenery, a cooler climate—including snow in the winter—and a raft of new structures, museums, and spaces to celebrate art and sports. All would fall under the Royal Commission for al-Ula, which Badr headed. Salvator Mundi aside, Badr started buying up art at a steady clip without attracting much attention. He was often spotted wearing a sharp suit and a big smile in London and New York, where the world’s top art consultants were all too eager to offer their advice and services. He hired French companies to embark on huge restoration projects and struck deals to build a smattering of boutique hotels.
Within a few years, al-Ula became an interesting experiment in tourism, a mixture of millennium-old sites and modern art installations, including a rectangular performance center called the Maraya Concert Hall that’s covered in huge sheets of mirrored metal, giving it the feeling of a mirage in a desert canyon. An annual four-month cultural festival, called Winter at Tantora, was launched in 2018, with performances by singer Andrea Bocelli and soft-rock icon Yanni. The Royal Commission later imported some high-end venues from London, including the celebrity-strewn private club Annabel’s, which opened a pop-up restaurant. The Public Investment Fund began having conversations about buying 10 percent of Soho House & Company, which operates private member clubs with trendy artist spaces, restaurants, and bedrooms across Europe, North America, and Asia. The idea was to open club outposts in Saudi Arabia and also to tap into Soho House’s influential clientele in a bid to raise the country’s profile.
Top artists, performers, and dignitaries were all too thrilled to be part of Saudi Arabia’s purported renaissance despite the crackdowns, arrests, and bloody war in Yemen. It seemed the young crown prince could do no wrong, and as he embarked on a tour of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he was the talk of the town.
Chapter 17
Man of the Year
April 2018
Strolling down Rodeo Drive in jeans and a dress shirt in the spring of 2018, unburdened by the responsibilities and restrictions of royalty, Mohammed bin Salman recalled the frisson he got in his twenties venturing around Paris or Marbella.
Away from Riyadh’s endless obligations, the family gatherings, midnight government meetings, and frenzied technocrats sending urgent WhatsApp messages at all hours, Mohammed found a freedom that was unattainable at home. In Riyadh, the responsibilities of governing were relentless, and even on his yacht Serene in the Red Sea or in al-Ula for the weekend, the obligations were nonstop. Mohammed worked all night and much of every day. There was no way to go for a stroll in the capital: Riyadh, with its heat and dust and tall buildings separated by wide boulevards with broken sidewalks, has no culture of ambling around for pleasure; even if it did, the crown prince couldn’t venture out without creating a public spectacle and security risk.
But in Beverly Hills, where his face didn’t stare down from billboards every few blocks, Mohammed could walk around unrecognized. Stopping into cafés and boutiques, he was just one more rich guy taking in the pleasures of cosmopolitan life. The difference between then and now was that Mohammed had gained great power to match his great wealth. Americans, especially important Americans, were starting to understand that.
Earlier on his American tour, he suddenly remembered a favorite restaurant in New York City from the months he stayed there with his father while his uncle Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the crown prince, was getting treatment for cancer. “We’re going to Bar Masa,” he told his entourage. That was no small matter. The Saudis had rented out much of the Plaza Hotel, and as a major government official, Mohammed had a huge retinue of Saudi and American bodyguards. Aides pleaded with him to let them call ahead and rent the place out and arrange an appropriate motorcade. But he refused, heading to the elevator and walking out onto the street for the fifteen-minute stroll along Central Park South to Columbus Circle, guards running ahead to create a protective perimeter.
The US leg of the trip came after a grand visit to the United Kingdom, where Saud al-Qahtani spent millions to buy up billboard space with Mohammed’s face emblazoned beside slogans such as “Welcome crown prince” and “He is bringing change to Saudi Arabia.” So wary was his security team of protests and threats that it hired dozens of British bodyguards and told them to call anyone else they knew in the close-protection industry and hire them too. They were ordered to follow protesters and to guard any Saudi official they could. The crown prince met the queen and attended a private dinner at Hampton Court Palace with powerful friends of Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard. The secret gathering spurred questions in the British press about mysterious sales of the newspapers to a Saudi businessman that year and the year before and a deal whereby the Salman family publishing business, Saudi Research and Marketing, would work with the Independent on new Independent-branded sites in Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, and Persian.
A couple of blocks from Rodeo Drive was the office of Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent who was trying to close a half-billion-dollar deal with Mohammed to get Saudi Arabia into the movie business. Near the Four Seasons, where Mohammed rented out all 285 rooms for his entourage, was the home of Rupert Murdoch, who would host a dinner for the prince to meet Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Mohammed was charming in meetings, even humorous. In one smaller meeting, he explained his love for The Walking Dead television show, whose zombies reminded him of Islamic extremists. And he admired Game of Thrones, except too many royals were killed, he said with a big grin.
Later the same month, Saudi Arabia had its first major film screening in decades, showing Black Panther in an auditorium with old-fashioned popcorn stalls. It was part of a rollout of hundreds of movie theaters and a new era for entertainment in the kingdom. Many commentators delighted in echoes of today’s Saudi Arabia in the film’s story: It’s about a young king who must decide whether to hide his jungle kingdom from, or engage with, the outside world.
That was one side of a frenzied 2018 for Mohammed, a year in which he would push through social and economic transformation plans at a dizzying pace and in full public view. In the coming months he would meet with presidents, CEOs, and tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, publicly proclaiming an open and innovative future for Saudi Arabia. He would make massive commitments to virtual reality and solar power and cutting-edge urban planning.
“The most influential Arab leader. Transforming the world at 32,” blared the cover of an unfamiliar magazine titled The New Kingdom (priced at $13.99) that showed up on newsstands across the United States just ahead of the prince’s visit.
The other side of Mohammed’s year was conducted in the shadows, in the form of stepped-up surveillance, arrests, kidnappings, and violence aimed at perceived enemies at home and abroad.
Both sides were on display at the dawn of the new year, when Mohammed took the bold step of imposing a consumption tax. It would be a boring piece of economic policymaking in most countries, but in the kingdom it was a major reform, the kind that experts at places like the World Bank encouraged. Saudi Arabia for decades used oil money, not taxes, to fund the government largely due to royal fears of how people would respond to taxation without representation. Now Mohammed was making Saudis pay for their government services. Reactions were so strong that King Salman gave a onetime cash handout to citizens five days later.
That same week, Mohammed made a much more secretive move.
At first, Salman bin Abdulaziz let the phone ring. It was the middle of the night, and Salman and his wife had gone to bed early, retiring to their separate rooms—as is customary among the Al Saud—before midnight.
Salman shared a name with Mohammed’s father, the king. But this Salman was a minor prince, a few years older than Mohammed, and an occasional annoyance. He had treated Mohammed with derision for his Saudi education when they were young men vacationing in France, and he’d upset Mohammed back in 2016, when he met Democratic congressman Adam Schiff in the run-up to a presidential election that Mohammed wanted the Republican to win.
Salman had no claim to the throne; he was one of the thousands of politically inconsequential royals, heirs to the Al Saud name and government stipends but not to power. Saudi Arabia’s hereditary structure meant he was destined to be a very rich nobody.
But Salman bin Abdulaziz had ambition that outstripped his family provenance. He attended the Sorbonne in Paris and swanned around Europe calling for world peace in speeches promoting his philanthropic “Visionary Movers Club.” In fact, Salman’s philanthropy seemed largely to entail the peculiar Saudi practice of lavishing gifts on some relatively poor Bedouin men who lived near his country retreat outside Riyadh.
In 2017, Salman selected a half dozen of the men—men who had never traveled outside the kingdom or ever seen a woman venture out in jeans, a member of the prince’s entourage says—to accompany him to Paris. The idea was to introduce them to culture and the refined life. He rented the men an apartment, where they proceeded to spend the next few months watching pornography and sleeping with prostitutes before returning with the prince to Saudi Arabia. It was a ridiculous endeavor.
Mohammed couldn’t stand princes like Salman, who seemed to be on permanent vacation, doing little to help build up Saudi Arabia. They made Saudis look absurd, with their ostentatious trips around Europe and the United States. Perhaps the most irksome thing about Prince Salman was that his wife, Areeb, was a daughter of King Abdullah. She’d inherited more than $1 billion upon her father’s death, money that Mohammed felt belonged to the government.
By the beginning of 2018, Mohammed had enough power that he need not suffer these irritating relatives. That’s why Salman’s phone was ringing at around 2 a.m. that night.
Finally it woke someone in the sleeping household, who roused the prince, his wife, and some of their staff. Come to the Royal Diwan—the court’s offices—the voice on the phone said. Mohammed wants to see you. Salman and a non-Saudi staffer set off in an SUV for the meeting, perplexed and worried.
It was still pitch dark when they arrived. Salman told the staffer to wait while he entered the offices alone. Immediately he was surrounded by guards, slapped around, and carried off to jail. Salman’s staffer waited outside until mid-morning and then left, convinced the prince wouldn’t be coming out.
The next day, the Royal Court announced that a group of princes, ostensibly including Salman, had been arrested because they showed up at the government office and made a violent stink about having to pay for electricity, which Mohammed had decided to stop giving to royals for free. Salman’s family and staff couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They didn’t mind paying for electricity—Salman literally had more money than he knew what to do with. He was in the process of building a private zoo, because what else would he spend his money on?
Salman’s father, Abdulaziz, began to panic. He had seen how Mohammed treated the Ritz detainees and Mohammed bin Nayef, and he worried that his son may have done something to anger the man who was now Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler. So he made a risky decision: Abdulaziz called on a foreigner for help.
The intermediary, Elie Hatem, was the Paris-based lawyer who had known Mohammed and Salman since they were boys. Salman’s father figured the lawyer could help because he’d recently been assisting Mohammed with a sticky family situation involving another problematic relative, Mohammed’s sister Hassa.
Hassa was older than Mohammed and had always had an independent streak. She was the only girl in the family, and she’d had a chilly relationship with Mohammed for years. Her behavior in Paris—late-night clubbing, public temper tantrums including an incident, one friend recalls, when she threw a plate at a server in a caviar restaurant—made her a potential liability. One day in 2017 she called Hatem in a panic: The police were in her Paris house, she said, and threatening to arrest her after a workman claimed he’d been beaten by the princess’s bodyguard on her orders in an incident the year before.
Hatem rushed to Hassa’s home on the Avenue Foch. The princess was tearful and trembling; she said the workman had photographed her with his phone as she exited the bathroom, and her bodyguard had broken the phone. Mohammed launched an attempt at damage control. Hassa hired Hatem to represent her, and Mohammed called him often for updates. He didn’t want Hassa embarrassing his family by acting like a stereotypically spoiled princess.
But Mohammed showed a limited understanding of how the West and its legal systems worked. “My father spoke to the president, so everything should be fine,” Mohammed told the lawyer in one 2017 call that Hatem later recounted to an associate. Mohammed, Hatem told the associate, said the king mentioned the problem to France’s then-president, François Hollande, and Mohammed expected the president to dismiss the case.
“No, no, that’s not how it works,” Hatem told Mohammed in Arabic. “The president can’t intervene.” This wasn’t Saudi Arabia, where every prosecutor reported to the King. This was France, a democracy with independent courts and a free press. The president couldn’t just decree that a criminal case be dismissed; doing so would turn into a scandal.
Hassa returned to Saudi Arabia, but the case dragged on in her absence, and a French judge issued an arrest warrant for her in 2018. It was in the middle of handling the case that the lawyer landed in Paris on a flight from Cyprus and found a text message from his old friend Abdulaziz asking him to call immediately.
Hatem phoned him from the airport. “Help me,” Abdulaziz said. His son Salman had gone to meet Mohammed the day before and got into some kind of fight in the palace before being arrested. Abdulaziz had heard all sorts of rumors, even that some of the guards involved were Americans. He didn’t know where his son was and asked Hatem for help finding him.
Two days after Salman’s arrest, Hatem called Mohammed. “You’re calling about my sister?” the prince asked.
“I am calling about your cousin,” Hatem replied. “I’d like to know what the status is with your cousin Salman.”
Mohammed was surprised. He didn’t expect family disputes to be aired out internationally. Why was he getting a call from a Lebanese French lawyer about something between him and his cousin?
Mohammed declined to answer any of Hatem’s questions. Instead, his guards arrested Abdulaziz, Salman’s father, and put him in prison too. Hatem was dropped from Hassa’s case, and contacts told him he would no longer be working with the royal family. No one saw Salman or his father for months, though one inmate of al-Ha’ir prison told a friend that he had seen the prince there in 2018. “He’d been beaten,” the inmate claimed.
Not long after, millions of dollars that Salman’s wife inherited from her father would disappear from her accounts in Saudi banks, along with the inheritances of Abdullah’s other children. The fears of the Abdullah clan in the days before their father’s death had come true. One son, Turki, was in jail, and the rest of the children had seen much of their fortunes disappear.
* * *
Mohammed and his advisors were becoming wildly thin-skinned. Now anyone who criticized his short time in power was denying Saudi Arabia’s reforms. Mohammed and his men saw these reforms not just as gradual changes that could make life a bit better but as existential necessities for the Al Saud. Without them, the family could lose its grip, and the country could go in a dangerous direction. This combination of sureness of mission and unwillingness to brook criticism led to tragically harsh crackdowns.
Few struck as deep a chord internationally as the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a young, bright Saudi woman treated like a rogue al-Qaeda operative for her efforts to push for the rights of women. Born in Jeddah, al-Hathloul spent most of her life in Saudi Arabia, save for a five-year stint as a child in France and four years in Canada for undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia. It was there that she had a political awakening.
On trips home, she’d lecture younger siblings about the horrid state of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. They responded that she’d been away too long, but she replied that she wasn’t being influenced by outside views—she believed these human rights were universal and that they were being denied to half the country. After university she felt a pull back to the Gulf and landed in the United Arab Emirates, where women were freer and jobs were more plentiful.
But her political views were still pulsing, and she joined in a nonviolent protest against the ban on women driving. One day in 2014 she got in her car in Dubai, where she was properly licensed, and drove to the border of Saudi Arabia. The police there, confused and angry, arrested her, and she was placed in a prison for minors and female victims of domestic abuse for seventy-three days. The treatment was gentle, and she told friends and family that it was an eye-opening experience. Under Saudi law, if a wife tries to run away from her husband—even if because of domestic abuse—he can call the police and have her arrested for disrespecting him. In many ways, it’s akin to the practice in the early twentieth century in America of husbands committing wives who didn’t like the way they were being treated to insane asylums.
Saudi Arabia was gentler then too. Even though she’d crossed the red line, no one was giving her rough treatment. She was released when her father signed a document saying she wouldn’t do it again. They smiled at home about the event, saying they’d laugh about it in ten years.
Not long after, she met stand-up comedian Fahad Albutairi, the “Seinfeld of the Middle East,” who would go on to become her husband. In typical Saudi fashion, they first met virtually over Twitter before eventually meeting in person in the Emirates where courtship is more acceptable. Al-Hathloul hadn’t lost her passion for women’s rights and grew more strident. At a women’s conference in Geneva, she attended as an individual and openly criticized an official delegation for its dishonesty. Unbeknownst to her, she landed directly on the radar of Saud al-Qahtani with her viral tweets critiquing each statement of the Saudi delegation.
