Blood and Oil, page 3
Abdullah tried to fix this: After assuming the throne, he created a council that included each living son of Ibn Saud and descendants of the dead ones. The so-called Allegiance Council was supposed to elect a crown prince who would assume the throne upon the king’s death and name a deputy who would be second in line. This arrangement was intended to prevent abrupt shifts in power. But by the end of Abdullah’s life, he and his sons saw another purpose for it: They wanted it to limit the power of Abdullah’s successor, Crown Prince Salman.
Abdullah and his sons knew that Salman, the most powerful of the living Sudairi Seven and a wily palace operator, would want to install his ambitious millennial son, Mohammed, in the line of succession. And they knew Mohammed would be a disaster for the Abdullah clan. For years he had clashed with the brothers and their top deputies, once spitting in the face of a powerful intelligence official. At best, an empowered Mohammed would cut off the Abdullah clan’s access to power and money. At worst, he could take their assets and their freedom.
To sideline Mohammed, Abdullah’s sons would rely on Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the chief of Abdullah’s Royal Court.
With a straight moustache, diamond ring, and rimless glasses, Tuwaijri was the most powerful nonroyal in Saudi Arabia, virtually born into the job. His father fought alongside Ibn Saud to conquer parts of Saudi Arabia and later helped Abdullah transform the kingdom’s National Guard into a formidable force.
As King Abdullah aged, Tuwaijri’s power grew. He signed new laws in Abdullah’s name and insinuated himself as secretary-general of the Allegiance Council. He was the only nonprince allowed in its secret meetings and the keeper of the single record of the council’s deliberations.
Tuwaijri’s most important role was controlling access to Abdullah, which was aided by the fact that the king didn’t like talking on the telephone. He could only speak comfortably in person. Even the ambassador to the United States would fly from Washington, DC, to Riyadh for a two-hour conversation. Whether you were a businessman or a government minister or even the king’s brother, meeting Abdullah required going through Tuwaijri. Court hangers-on and observers called him “King Khalid.”
This was unprecedented power for someone outside the royal family, and it infuriated Crown Prince Salman and his son Mohammed. Tuwaijri knew that he would meet the same fate as Abdullah’s sons—or worse—if Salman’s power wasn’t checked. To Salman and Mohammed, Tuwaijri represented everything that was wrong with Saudi Arabia. The functionary bought mansions, boats, and some two hundred luxury cars. He’d take weeks-long trips with a twenty-five-person entourage to the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South, piling up millions of dollars’ worth of expenses and taking pictures with locals as if he were royalty. “I thought he was some kind of prince,” says Rahul Bhasin, who still has a photo of Tuwaijri behind the counter at Parkview Electronics, his tiny camera and cell phone store around the corner from the Ritz, where Tuwaijri used to buy iPhones by the dozen. Few things upset Salman more than a nonroyal acting like a prince.
One of Tuwaijri’s chief allies, Mohammed al-Tobaishi, was the head of protocol for Abdullah. Essentially a glorified personal secretary, Tobaishi lived in a ninety-room Riyadh ranch called Samarra when he wasn’t in one of his other luxury homes around the world. The two men were billionaire power brokers hiding behind servile titles, men who took money in exchange for providing access to senior officials (they neither admitted any wrongdoing nor were convicted of any crime, though they later had assets seized by the state). In the eyes of Salman and his son, they were a risk to the dynasty and examples of runaway graft.
Mohammed bin Salman had his own firsthand experiences with Tuwaijri, who had pretended to take an avuncular role with him when Mohammed was first working in government jobs in his twenties. But Mohammed learned Tuwaijri was two-faced. While pretending to support him, Tuwaijri took steps to prevent Mohammed’s rise within the family hierarchy. “He laid traps for me,” Mohammed told friends, describing how at every juncture, Tuwaijri tried to drive him out of government or, failing that, to bribe him into complacency. Mohammed was also bitter since, a few years earlier, Tuwaijri had disciplined him on Abdullah’s orders for belittling senior military officials.
With Abdullah nearing death, Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the youngest of Ibn Saud’s living sons, was second in the line of succession to the throne. Tuwaijri and his Abdullah-clan allies saw Muqrin as a buffer against any attempts to elevate young Mohammed. If they couldn’t push Salman out of the succession line, they figured, they had to at least keep Muqrin.
Seventy-nine years old and tall, with a dyed-black goatee, Salman had been the family enforcer—and the keeper of Al Saud secrets—for half a century. Younger members of the royal family whispered that Salman must have had cameras in the bedrooms of powerful Al Saud figures.
Three generations of princes and their hangers on told stories of being slapped across the face with Salman’s gold-and-emerald pinky ring as punishment for drinking alcohol, driving too fast on the outskirts of the capital, or getting caught trying to pull off a brazen corruption scheme.
His temper was the subject of Royal Court lore. Salman was often quiet and thoughtful, prone to quoting Islamic poetry over his nightly card game. But he could erupt with fury at a perceived show of disrespect. Striding through the Jeddah palace of his brother, then-king Fahd, in the early 1990s, Salman was shocked when Fahd’s longtime guard stood in his way. The king, the guard told him, was busy.
Salman slapped the man so hard that his ring flew across the room. “I’m the prince! Who are you?” Salman shouted, while young courtiers and servants crawled around the floor, searching for the ring. After Fahd chided his brother, Salman left an envelope for the guard with one hundred thousand riyals—more than $20,000. “Give the idiot this,” Salman muttered on his way out. (A royal family member disputes this happened.)
Unlike other sons of Ibn Saud who built fortunes by using their power to extract payments from companies doing business in the kingdom, Salman was less aggressive about building wealth. He spent his royal allowance on his palaces, his wives, and his children and spent his energy running Riyadh, the Al Saud’s historic center of power.
As the governor of the province for forty-eight years, Salman controlled millions of acres of land that grew in value as the city of Riyadh transformed from a village at the start of his governorship into a modern city of more than five million people. Salman also supervised the relationship with the Wahhabist clerics whose alliance with the Al Saud stretched back to Wahhab himself—and whose support had helped the Al Saud gain and maintain power since the kingdom’s founding.
Salman welcomed a diversity of viewpoints into his palace, encouraging debate in a way other princes wouldn’t countenance. His Saudi Research and Marketing Group owned two of the biggest Arabic newspapers in the Middle East. They weren’t mere government mouthpieces either, encouraging views from across the region about the biggest issues of the time, especially the Palestinian cause. On the other hand, they never dared question the monarchy or criticize Saudi foreign policy. Salman invited writers, academics, and foreign diplomats to weekly dinners. He told one American contact that he’d read every novel ever published by a Saudi writer.
Salman’s relationship with his older sons was chilly. Distant and imperious as a young father (Salman was just nineteen when his oldest son was born), he was a rigid disciplinarian who focused on educating the young men. He wanted his sons to learn there was more to the world than Saudi Arabia’s twin pillars of oil wealth and Wahhabism. Life was full of poetry and literature and ideas, and Salman, the son of a man who conquered Saudi Arabia on camelback, wanted his own sons to gain knowledge that would later benefit them as statesmen.
Regular vacations to Spain and France brought intellectuals and businessmen into Salman’s tea room. Members of the Syrian-Spanish Kayali merchant family were frequent visitors to his palaces, as were members of the Assad family, which continues to rule Syria. In Paris, Salman invited lawyers and political contacts for discussions and debates, often on the fractious politics of the Middle East.
These lessons seemed to mold the sons Salman had with his first wife, Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, beginning in the 1950s. They went abroad for schooling and learned multiple languages. Fahd and Ahmed became successful businessmen, running Saudi Research and Marketing, raising world-class racehorses, and operating a lucrative partnership with UPS. Sultan became the first Saudi citizen to go into outer space, on the US space shuttle Discovery; Abdulaziz was an oil expert who handled sensitive relationships for the government with other petroleum-producing countries; and Faisal was the academic, achieving a doctorate in political studies from the University of Oxford with a dissertation on relations between the Gulf states and Iran from 1968 to 1971. They had friends in the United States and London and met often with politicians from abroad. They were impressive, cosmopolitan, and Western in their sensibilities. To some, they didn’t seem very Saudi. They even objected when Salman decided to take a new wife while still married to their mother, a long-standing tradition in Saudi culture.
It was 1983, and the princes’ mother, Sultana Al Sudairi, was in a Pittsburgh hospital for a kidney transplant. Sultana was a revered figure within the royal family and practically worshipped by her five sons and daughter. The family brought an entourage of dozens of relatives and aides to Pittsburgh; each morning they would rush to the Presbyterian-University Hospital lobby to make sure they were waiting when Salman arrived. Then flanked by two security guards, Salman would pace around the hospital awaiting news from doctors.
Before the trip, Salman’s three oldest sons, Fahd, Sultan, and Ahmed, learned that their father was getting ready to marry a much younger woman. It wasn’t unusual; after marrying her, Salman would still have just two wives in a country where a man may be married to four women at once. But his westernized sons viewed polygamy as outdated, insulting to their mother, and particularly insensitive when she was facing a life-threatening illness.
Salman brushed aside his sons’ concerns, but in Pittsburgh, Fahd doubled down, storming out of the hospital to a nearby airport and hopping on a private plane, where he wrote a letter to his father that he gave to a messenger to bring back to Pittsburgh. Don’t marry this woman, Fahd wrote. It’s an insult to your wife.
Salman married her anyway. The young woman, Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, was the daughter of a leader of the Ajman tribe, which had a long history as warriors fighting alongside, and sometimes against, the Al Saud. Two years later, Fahdah would give birth to her first son, Mohammed bin Salman. Five more would follow.
Those six boys had a very different upbringing than their much older brothers. In middle age, Salman lost the rigidity with which he’d raised his first brood. During a nighttime card game in the Jeddah home of King Fahd’s son, one courtier recalls, five-year-old Mohammed ran in and started knocking off the men’s headdresses. The boy kicked over a cup of tea and threw some cards on the floor before Salman called him over, laughing, and gave the pudgy child a hug. “Take Mohammed back,” Salman told one of the boy’s minders. Young Mohammed proceeded to kick the minder in the crotch.
Mohammed and his full brothers didn’t absorb the passion for academia and living abroad instilled in Salman’s first brood. While the older brothers were establishing their careers, adolescent Mohammed seemed aimless. He had a habit of daydreaming during family events, a tendency some mistook for absentmindedness. On vacations to Marbella or elsewhere, he and his younger brother Khalid would go off exploring or scuba diving. He’d spend hours playing video games, including the Age of Empires series where you build armies and conquer enemies, and indulging a love of fast food. Salman still brought professors and writers around and hosted weekly seminars, but his requests that Mohammed study or read books rather than play video games seemed more like nagging than the strict orders the prince used to issue to his older sons.
One afternoon, Salman got a call from a flustered staffer: the preteen Mohammed was at a local supermarket, dressed in a military outfit and making a scene. The police wanted to detain him, but the young prince told them they couldn’t. He was the nephew of the king and the son of the governor of Riyadh. Salman handled the affair quietly, but it was clear the stern old-timer had a soft spot for Mohammed, who was more like a grandson because of the nearly fifty-year age gap between them.
During a family trip to Cannes in 2000, Salman invited over a Paris-based lawyer named Elie Hatem, who had known members of the Saudi royal family through his work in pro-monarchist political groups and frequently mixed with them during their trips to France. “Instead of playing games, go read,” Salman told the fifteen-year-old Mohammed one day when Hatem came for lunch. The men lingered over a lavish Middle Eastern food spread while Mohammed sat eating McDonald’s. The boy responded with a desultory “OK, Dad.”
One afternoon, Salman asked Hatem to check in on Mohammed and make sure he was doing something productive. Encourage him to read anything, even a magazine or newspaper, and stop playing games, Salman told the lawyer. The boy just watched TV.
Soon after that visit to France, things changed for the teenage prince. He had a realization that would alter his understanding of money and power. While observers like Hatem saw an aimless young man struggling in the shadow of his accomplished brothers, they misunderstood what the prince was absorbing during his years on the sidelines. While his brothers may have learned refinement from the teachers their father brought in, Mohammed was watching Salman closely and learning about power.
By the time Abdullah was lying on his deathbed, Mohammed was almost thirty and a formidable adversary for Abdullah’s sons and courtiers, more energetic, creative, and cutthroat than anyone expected. He was driven and absolutely certain he knew what the country needed not just to survive but to flourish. And by staying close to his father’s side through his twenties, rather than leaving Saudi Arabia for his schooling, Mohammed had learned in great depth about the frailties of his rivals within the royal family.
Salman’s role as family enforcer was becoming more taxing and thornier as the royal family grew. Each prince could have up to four wives at a time, and with each wife he might have three or four sons and a similar number of daughters. During Salman’s forty-eight years as Riyadh’s governor, the extended family blossomed into some seven thousand princes and at least as many princesses, all of them growing up with a sense of entitlement to a share of the country’s oil profits. Many lived wealthy but relatively normal lives, and some became philanthropists or investors; others were deadbeats, gamblers, or drunks. And more than a few were greedy beyond belief, spending unimaginable sums on collections of Bugattis and Patek Philippe watches such that “Saudi” became a synonym for profligate consumerism in Western cities.
The lives of luxury created an issue when it came to ruling the country. Ibn Saud and his sons who served as king had each spent at least some of their childhood in the desert, close to the Bedouin fighters and conservative clerics who supported them. For them a brand-new Cadillac, falcon hunting, and a surfeit of food constituted a life of luxury. This new generation was schooled abroad, living for long stretches in the privileged bubbles of London’s Mayfair or Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Many had lost part of their Saudi culture and their understanding of the Islamic interests that were locked in a powerful embrace with the House of Saud.
By the 2000s, many of the Al Saud’s best and brightest weren’t Saudi enough to connect with the explosion of youth in the country. Saudi Arabia’s growing population was becoming more connected to the rest of the world and more restless in their straightjacketed lives, thanks to smartphones and social media. But the young princes were oblivious to much of what was happening at home, busy vacationing or pursuing degrees.
Salman tried to serve as a bulwark against this loss of identity, disciplining princes for Western behavior unbecoming in conservative Saudi Arabia. To many he seemed like an eccentric, a member of the Al Saud who wielded power within the family and within the kingdom but would never ascend beyond the role of Riyadh’s governor. For Salman, the math just wasn’t right.
By 2010, five years into King Abdullah’s reign, Salman was over seventy years old and had two equally accomplished older brothers standing between him and the throne. For most of the time Abdullah reigned, there was no reason for Tuwaijri, the Royal Court chief, to see Salman or his children as a threat. They were too far from the line of succession.
Then one of those older brothers died in 2011 and the other in 2012. In each case, Abdullah named a new crown prince himself rather than having the Allegiance Council, which he had formed for the purpose, debate to determine the succession. When the second brother died, Abdullah made Salman crown prince and appointed his youngest living brother, former intelligence chief Muqrin, as deputy crown prince.
As Abdullah grew frailer, Tuwaijri tried to create distance between the king and the crown prince. He still hoped Abdullah was open to casting Salman aside. Tuwaijri sometimes denied Salman and his sons the use of royal planes. When Salman would call to set up a meeting, the court chief would tell him that Abdullah was too busy. After months of this, Salman realized what was happening when he saw Abdullah at a family occasion. “Why don’t you come to see me anymore?” the king asked. “You’re one of my favorite brothers.” Salman understood Tuwaijri was trying to sideline him.
Tuwaijri activated his whisper network to spread the notion that Salman was suffering from dementia, a bid to hasten succession plans. He sought buy-in from other influential royals to carry out what would be the progress-minded Abdullah’s last great reform: passing the crown to the next generation. Perhaps one of Abdullah’s sons, maybe Miteb or Turki, could be placed in the line of succession as deputy crown prince so that he would one day be king. Or perhaps giving Mohammed bin Nayef, the domestic security chief with deep ties to the CIA and US State Department, a place in the line of succession might help get US buy-in. Bin Nayef also controlled the powerful Saudi Interior Ministry. As Abdullah’s sons controlled the Saudi National Guard, the traditionally Bedouin force that protected the royal family, a union between the two branches would have clear control of the military.
