Blood and Oil, page 28
In March 2018, she was abruptly arrested by UAE national security officers, who brought her to Saudi Arabia where she was detained under much harsher circumstances. She stayed in jail for only a few days before being released to her family home but was barred from traveling.
Then, in May officers came and arrested her again. This time they accused her of conspiring with foreign enemies, namely Qatar, and providing information to foreign governments about her country. She held no secrets, but the very act of critiquing her homeland to others was enough to be considered a traitor and a “national security threat.” She was arrested along with other activists pushing for women’s rights, and Albutairi, her husband, was arrested in Jordan.
Weeks later she called her parents, pretending everything was fine and saying she was staying in a “hotel.” But they knew something was wrong. Her words were hollow and strained. When they finally were able to see her, she continued the charade as officers watched. Her mother was startled into silence, seeing how she struggled to hold a cup of water or swallow. She had red marks on her body. During the same period, Albutairi decided he couldn’t stay with her any longer and asked for a divorce (some accounts said the authorities forced him to divorce her). These were cruel consequences for a young woman simply asking for rights widely championed around the world.
On her family’s third visit she finally admitted she was being tortured. It was as if her interrogators thought they could convince her through force to give up her activism and erase any negative memories of her experience under detention. Saud al-Qahtani himself was one of the alleged perpetrators. Though the government has in general always denied using violence, it is claimed he threatened to rape and kill her before throwing her body in a sewer where her remains would never be found.
The bitter irony was that Mohammed bin Salman was pushing through the same reforms she was calling for. Why crack down on the activists when all he really needed to do was invite them to the majlis and promise them he was a believer? The answer was disturbing: In Mohammed’s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, reforms could only come from the top, lest citizens come to believe they could obtain their rights through protest or openly criticize the royal family. For all his liberal views, Mohammed was in general agreement with his uncles, aunts, brothers, and cousins on one thing: It was best for the Al Saud to run things.
The brutal tactics backfired, and al-Hathloul’s case later became a global rallying cry against Mohammed bin Salman’s regime.
Back in March, when al-Hathloul was first arrested, Mohammed turned his attention abroad. He took off for Egypt. Right away he doubled down on his forceful foreign policy approach, telling a newspaper interviewer that Turkey was part of a “triangle of evil” with Iran and extremist Islamic groups. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had been trying to improve his country’s relations with Saudi Arabia, but Mohammed dashed those hopes.
As the foreign trip continued to the United States, word circulated in the financial world that the prince and his sovereign wealth fund were readying a spending spree of incredible proportions. It began with a $400 million investment in a company called Magic Leap, which was developing “augmented reality” headsets but had yet to start selling any of its products. Michael Klein, the former Citigroup banker who had once been close to Alwaleed bin Talal, negotiated the deal.
Spending Saudi billions wasn’t the main purpose of the 2018 trip to the United States. Now that he was crown prince, Mohammed expected to meet politicians and business leaders and convince them to invest their money in his rapidly transforming kingdom. Under his rule, Saudi Arabia would no longer be a place where American entrepreneurs just went looking for capital. Now, Mohammed was determined that Saudi Arabia’s modernizing economy, young population, and innovative leadership would make it a destination for billions of dollars in American investment.
Things started out well at the White House on March 20. It was almost exactly a year after his earlier lunch there. Back then he had just been the deputy crown prince and only landed a meal with the president because a more important guest, Angela Merkel, was delayed by bad weather.
Now Mohammed was the guest of honor, leading a delegation of Saudis in black bishts into the Oval Office. Quickly, though, a fissure in Mohammed’s vision became clear. As they sat in chairs beneath a portrait of George Washington, Donald Trump told Mohammed how enthusiastic he was about the Saudi relationship. “You are more than the crown prince now,” Trump said. “We have become very good friends over a short period of time.” But next to the president was a poster that made Mohammed cringe.
It looked like something from a middle school science fair. “KSA Sales Pending,” it said in black text on a yellow background. Below it was a map of the United States with highlighted regions that would benefit from what Trump said was $12.5 billion in arms sales. “That’s peanuts for you,” he told the prince.
Mohammed sat smiling stiffly, privately fuming. The president was undermining his whole pitch about Saudi Arabia, treating the prince as a mere deep pocket for politically helpful spending. “Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation, and they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth,” Trump declared in public remarks released by the White House.
That dissonance between the prince’s goals and those of his American counterparts would underlie every aspect of the trip. From Mohammed’s perspective, Saudi Arabia’s commitment to fast modernization and building an industrial base, its tech-savvy populace and its new openness to Western entertainment should make it an attractive place for American companies to invest billions of dollars. From the perspective of the Americans Mohammed was meeting, the calculus was much simpler: Mohammed was a guy with $1 trillion to spend who ran a country with a total population “roughly two-thirds the size of California,” in the words of one Hollywood deal maker hired by the kingdom to generate entertainment business. There just wasn’t enough upside, he said, for most companies to justify investing billions of dollars in a place with opaque courts, restrictive laws for women, and the constant threat of some kind of PR debacle.
Each of the men Mohammed would meet in the United States had some vision for how he could use a huge Saudi investment and little to say about putting his own money into the kingdom. The studio chiefs hoped Mohammed would back new movie projects. Silicon Valley wanted capital to further inflate bubbles like WeWork and the dog-walking app Wag. Even the curious magazine that showed up across the United States celebrating the prince’s visit seemed to be a sales pitch.
The magazine was in the tradition of low-brow royal worship that US newsstands hadn’t seen since the days of Princess Diana. Beneath the title The New Kingdom, Mohammed stared out in a red-checked shemagh and white thobe, smirking yet somehow still looking serious. Surrounding him were text boxes announcing, “Our Closest Middle East Ally Destroying Terrorism,” “Controlling Staggering $4 Trillion Business Empire,” and “Building $640 Billion Sci-Fi City of the Future,” the numbers apparently pulled from thin air. It’s unclear how many people actually bought the $13.99 magazine or whether anyone took it as a piece of journalism. But it didn’t really matter; it appeared to have been published for an audience of one, the crown prince himself, by men angling for their own chunk of Saudi cash.
Publisher David Pecker was the chief executive of National Enquirer parent American Media Inc. He had supported Trump from early on, landing himself in the middle of the “catch-and-kill” scandal in which he agreed to buy, and not publish, incriminating material from a stripper who claimed to have had an affair with the president. Pecker’s company was seeking investment for an expansion of its Mr. Olympia competition into the Middle East, and after meeting Mohammed in 2017, he wanted to seal a deal in 2018. The timeframe overlapped with the fawning publication promoting Mohammed’s vision for what the magazine called the “magic kingdom.”
In the middle of it all, with an article about Saudi Arabia’s new economy written under his byline and a photo of himself standing stiffly next to Trump, was a young French banker named Kacy Grine. He was another unlikely person drawn into the prince’s orbit, the kind of international figure who, in the world of Saudi money, can go from obscurity to high-profile businessman with a single princely handshake.
Grine was thirty but looked younger. His unlined face appeared incapable of growing a beard, and a lustrous thicket of chestnut brown hair sprouted upward and outward from his head. Grine had the air of what Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer, called the “professional son,” a young man who gained stature by cultivating one father figure after another.
Grine got into the business of Saudi deal making largely through Alwaleed bin Talal. They had met years earlier, when Grine, then a junior banker, played a role in a deal Alwaleed negotiated with the president of Senegal. The older prince took a liking to the sharp young Frenchman, who listened more than he talked and, when he did talk, did so quietly and succinctly.
In subsequent deals, Alwaleed suggested that his negotiating partners hire Grine as an advisor. That provided steady business, and soon people who wanted Alwaleed’s money knew Grine could be a conduit to the prince. Grine maintained the relationship by visiting Alwaleed in his Riyadh home several times a year, accompanying him to business meetings and on trips to the desert where the prince would hand out cash to Bedouins.
Grine seemed well placed in the early days of Mohammed’s ascent. It was Alwaleed who first suggested Mohammed’s strategy of using Saudi oil money to make big overseas investments, and Alwaleed publicly praised Mohammed’s ambitious plans for the economy. Grine developed relationships with men like American-British tycoon Len Blavatnik and Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel.
It was through Emanuel that Grine got to know Pecker, who brought the young banker to the White House in 2017 to meet Trump. With the connections to Trump, to Hollywood, and to Saudi Arabia’s highest-profile prince, Grine seemed like the perfect person to put at the center of the magazine.
By the time it was published, though, there was an awkward complication: Alwaleed, who had been detained at the Ritz, was still under house arrest. Mohammed had locked him up, accused him of corruption, financially neutered him, and then trotted a haggard looking Alwaleed out publicly to give a humiliating statement that everything was fine. After all that, Alwaleed was still barred from traveling.
Following his years of business and friendship with Alwaleed, Grine was now appearing in a magazine promoting the man who had locked Alwaleed up. Saudi watchers were confused, and Grine told associates that he remained loyal to Alwaleed.
The magazine backfired for just about everyone. Saudi officials were forced to deny to American reporters that the government had paid for the publication. Pecker’s relationship to Trump, rather than the grand plans of the prince, became the focal point for many US pundits. Grine, who preferred to operate on the fringes, was now in the center of an embarrassing uproar that brought lots of publicity and no money.
Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed.
To Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor whose interview with Barack Obama years earlier led Mohammed to believe that the former president was supporting Iran over Saudi Arabia, the prince made a surprising pronouncement: He asserted that Israel had the right to exist, a first for a senior Saudi royal, and a huge shift for a kingdom that, as recently as 2012, published middle school textbooks that called Jews apes.
Such statements, as well as Mohammed’s embrace of socially liberal Hollywood and Silicon Valley and his promise to bring “moderate” Islam to Saudi Arabia, gave some Americans the wrong impression. One dinner attendee at Murdoch’s house, actor and former pro wrestler Dwayne Johnson, said in a Facebook post that he loved meeting the prince. “I look forward to my first visit soon to Saudi Arabia,” he wrote, adding, “I’ll be sure to bring my finest tequila to share with the [sic] his Royal Highness and family.” The Rock and other Americans didn’t understand that in important ways, Mohammed was a traditionalist. He might drink, but only privately. And his reforms—the embrace of the West, the break with the religious establishment, the lifting of the ban on women driving—were geared to satisfy a potentially restive young population. It was all done with the Al Saud’s oldest goal in mind: maintaining power over the kingdom.
Careful observers saw that when it came to controlling the kingdom and its neighbors. Mohammed was hardly forward-looking. In the Atlantic interview, he told Goldberg that Iran’s supreme leader was worse than Hitler. Word leaked from Riyadh that Mohammed had also detained his own mother, who had started questioning some of his governance decisions to the king.
While Americans celebrated Saudi Arabia’s new freedoms for women, Mohammed’s men were carrying out a roundup of the very women who pushed for the new reforms. Even if the activists and the prince agreed that women should be allowed to drive, people who publicly opposed his government, especially those who took their grievances abroad, were being locked up.
By the time his US trip wrapped up in Houston in early April, Mohammed had made little headway in his goal of attracting American companies to invest in Saudi Arabia. But he’d made a big splash as an investor, committing more than $20 billion in Saudi cash for weapons, petrochemicals projects, and investments in technology and entertainment companies, including $400 million in Ari Emanuel’s firm Endeavor and some $2 billion in Tesla.
He returned to the kingdom emboldened to carry through even more ambitious domestic reforms. And he pushed even harder to make it seem as if big, innovative Western companies were going to make investments in Saudi Arabia. He targeted Jeff Bezos. After the prince and the Amazon founder had dinner together in LA, they traded contact numbers and began a long WhatsApp exchange over a project that would see Amazon spend $2 billion or more on a facility that would host computers processing data for Mideast customers.
For Bezos, the deal could be an important entry into the competitive Mideast market. For Mohammed, there was relatively little at stake economically; so-called server farms don’t provide many jobs. But having the world’s richest man bring one of the world’s most powerful companies to the kingdom would be a great image boost for Mohammed.
Over the next several months, he told Bezos over WhatsApp of his excitement about the deal—and his dismay that Amazon had been so slow to get started in Saudi Arabia. “I was very disappointed,” Mohammed told Bezos, that Amazon built a facility in neighboring Bahrain before Saudi Arabia. And he told Bezos that Amazon had “pushed” Saudi Arabia to invest in an e-commerce competitor by not coming to the kingdom earlier. Now was a chance for a productive new partnership for Amazon and Saudi Arabia, one that the prince and the billionaire could announce on stage together later that year at the Riyadh investment conference called Davos in the Desert. “It is very important for me, my friend, that you come to Saudi during the future investment Forum and we announce this $2.8B Vision 2030 partnership,” Mohammed told Bezos over WhatsApp.
In fact, getting Bezos on stage for the public relations coup was Mohammed’s ultimate goal. Soon after he and Bezos shared dinner, Musaad al-Aiban, the security official who helped plan the 2017 Trump visit to Riyadh, decided not to move ahead with Amazon’s plan because the company wouldn’t allow Saudi intelligence and law enforcement to access data on the facility’s computers. But Royal Court members were told to make sure Amazon never got that message. “Never say no publicly. We just keep stalling and cite bureaucratic delays,” a government advisor who worked on the project told the Wall Street Journal.
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Mohammed’s social reforms and his autocratic streak continued at home. In June, the ban on women driving was officially lifted. The ha’ya, the bearded religious police who roamed Riyadh’s malls castigating women with open abayas, had already started disappearing from public view in 2016, when Mohammed had confined them to their offices. Now they were rarely seen on the streets. After years of concerts and movie theaters being banned, new sources of entertainment flooded Saudi Arabia. Mohammed was proud that Canada’s Cirque du Soleil planned to visit the kingdom.
Then, after 10 p.m. one evening, a Canadian government official got an unexpected call from Saudi entertainment minister Ahmed al-Khatib. The minister had Canadian contacts because he also had a role in military procurement, and Canadian companies were looking to sell to the kingdom. But this call wasn’t about defense sales. It was about Cirque du Soleil, also a Canadian company, which had just canceled a visit to the kingdom for scheduling reasons.
“MBS is pissed off,” Khatib told the official. “He loves Cirque du Soleil. This is unacceptable. You have to make them come.”
The official gently explained that someone in his position didn’t have the power to force a circus to perform. If Cirque du Soleil didn’t want to come to Riyadh, it didn’t have to.
A frustrated Khatib hung up and got to work finding an alternative. But the Russian Cirque knockoff he hired didn’t fool anyone. Rather, its leotard-wearing female acrobats created such a backlash on Saudi Twitter, sparking tweets about “naked” Russian women, that MBS replaced Khatib as entertainment minister.
