Blood and Oil, page 33
MBN said he had no secret stash of money, and on a visit in November 2019, he told Ahmed that his wife and daughters were being “starved” by the financial block placed on his family. It may have been simple venting, and it was certainly hyperbole, but Mohammed’s team caught the exchange. Later that month, MBN was called to attend a meeting at the National Guard—where the crown prince’s childhood friend and close ally Abdullah bin Bandar was in charge—or face consequences. Feeling particularly ornery, he refused to go.
That precipitated the first crackdown. A few days afterward, Royal Court guards showed up at MBN’s palace and escorted away his closest employees, including secretaries, IT staff, and his longtime personal guard. They even built a fence around his helicopter pad, possibly to prevent him from escaping, even though it had been used only to park cars in the preceding months. The guards questioned the employees about any escape or coup plans. The staff were released, but people who answered to Mohammed bin Salman’s Royal Court took over MBN’s security.
Almost simultaneously with his declaration of an oil war, Mohammed had MBN and Ahmed detained. Musaad al-Aiban, the security official who helped plan President Trump’s Riyadh trip, called members of the royal family to tell them Ahmed and MBN were suspected of treason, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Considering the tepid backstory, they clearly weren’t a near and present danger. It was simply the right moment, amid a maelstrom of news and economic drama, to execute another crucial step in MBS’s path to the kingship. With even these relatively weak threats extinguished, he had a clear view for going forward.
Faisal bin Abdullah, a son of the former king, wrote a letter to King Salman complaining of Ahmed’s treatment. He too was arrested.
One clue that the family crackdown wasn’t a staged plan was that MBS was planning a month-long vacation to his château in France or the game park his family owned in South Africa just weeks before the oil war and family crackdown. Many of his top aides were planning to take some time off, too, after months of working brutal sixteen-hour days.
That Friday night was a quintessential MBS moment: a bold decision made, in the face of awesome and dangerous consequences, in the hopes that the bet would pay off. Every oil company in the world might curse his name and countries might go bankrupt for his action, but if it meant a better deal for Saudi Arabia, it was worth it. And the family crackdown wasn’t necessary—it risked reinforcing his image as a strongman ruler who bossed around his uncles and cousins—but if it improved his odds by even a small margin, it was worth the risk. It was better to be seen as unnecessarily draconian than as tolerant of any criticism.
Mohammed had called the first phase of his Yemen war “Decisive Storm,” or Asifat al-Hazm in Arabic. The phrase captured Mohammed himself. He wasn’t always hasty, but he was definitely decisive. When a decision was made, he went in with guns blazing. And his changes often felt stormy, a pell-mell of decisions made in short succession seemingly without much consideration for how things might develop if they all happened at the same time. When the clouds parted, Saudi citizens couldn’t help but feel a little dizzy. It had been five years of that kind of change.
Mohammed had started out thinking of 2020 as a year of restoring his place in the global power structure. Leaving behind the Yemen war, the Khashoggi scandal, and the bad press about jailing critics, he was planning for a G-20 meeting in Riyadh in the fall that would entrench Saudi Arabia as one of the world’s influential and forward-looking powers, with a young leader who could rule for another half century. His aide Fahad al-Toonsi was placed in charge of the most important event on the year’s agenda.
There was no merit system for hosting the summit. It was Saudi Arabia’s turn because of the G-20 chair rotation. But it was a perfect opportunity to showcase the country in almost as big a fashion as when Donald Trump came on his first international trip as president. The kingdom had already undergone major changes in daily life. Parts of Riyadh and other major cities felt increasingly like Dubai—men mixing with women wearing no head coverings in restaurants and shopping areas. Tourists were beginning to trickle in, inspired by Instagram celebrities paid by the Saudi government to come and spread the word about its offerings.
There was little doubt that Mohammed was the first royal to capitalize on the country’s history, refurbishing the ancestral home of the Al Saud in Diriyah in Riyadh and making al-Ula in the north of the country into a world-class destination. They were genuinely interesting sites to behold, and the G-20 plans were being tuned to highlight them and show the new face of the kingdom.
In characteristically blunt terms, Mohammed told top aides to solve the country’s biggest reputational problems, including the detention of women activists, the war in Yemen, and the boycott of Qatar. Many observers thought of him as hot-headed and emotionally reactive. But these issues were, in large part, numbers on a chart to him. Surveys conducted by Western firms on behalf of Saudi Arabia highlighted them as obstacles to Saudi Arabia gaining its foothold in the world—just like the surveys he conducted at the outset that identified perceptions of religious extremism and the lack of women’s rights among international audiences.
Meanwhile, the Public Investment Fund was meant to be on the hunt for big deals that could put Saudi Arabia back on the investing map. There were new funds to deploy for high-profile investments, like the planned acquisition of Newcastle’s football team. Even after the Aramco IPO went from a potential financial event of the century to a less exciting regional event, bankers were starting to return in droves to Riyadh. There was talk of reviving an international listing, a means to raise more money but also to prove to innumerable critics that he was no financial novice. One billionaire who met him during this time believed Mohammed to be genuinely in transition as a leader. In private conversations, MBS admitted to having been too thin-skinned in his first few years running the country and too worried about dissidents. He wasn’t sorrowful, though. He was confident.
But in the eyes of the rest of the world, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi wasn’t going away. Mohammed had remained consistent since Saudi Arabia admitted he’d been killed, saying in meetings with officials and businessmen that he was responsible because he was in charge but that he had no prior knowledge of the incident. Longtime Saudi observers and even some citizens in private moments doubted that such a detail-oriented workaholic could not have known about such a big operation—or that the employees of such a heavy-handed ruler would take such extreme action without his permission. But Mohammed insisted that with so many employees, he cannot always know what each is doing and that the killing was a mistake.
The affair would surge in importance at times, such as when the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings published her findings in December 2019, but a full-throated indictment never seemed to materialize. Any hard evidence, if it existed, probably lay in US intelligence vaults, and Washington didn’t seem to see any advantage in pressing the matter further. The stain would undoubtedly persist until the day MBS’s obituary was written, but it might grow fainter as the years went by—in the United States and Europe, at least—especially if he pulled off any big-picture moves such as shaking hands with an Israeli leader. That one might have to wait until he was king.
While Mohammed was planning a way forward, those left behind on his path to power continued to struggle.
Saad al-Jabri, the former counterterrorism official who introduced a young Mohammed to his US contacts before being fired and accused of extremism, remained safely outside the country. But it was hardly a comfortable exile. Two of Jabri’s children, teenagers when he left the kingdom, remained in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed refused to let them leave. When his old US contacts asked about the man they knew as Dr. Saad, Saudi officials said he was a wanted man, in control of billions of dollars that MBN had taken, and his children wouldn’t be allowed to leave the kingdom unless he returned the money.
But the Saudi government never produced evidence supporting this charge, and American intelligence officials suspected that the children were being confined to keep Jabri from talking. The man had decades worth of government secrets that Mohammed didn’t want aired in public.
For nearly five years, the situation remained tense. Jabri stayed silent, while old friends in Washington tried to figure out if there was a way to extricate his children. An older son, a physician in the United States, told friends he wanted desperately to help but feared that any political action or involvement of the US government could anger Mohammed and imperil his younger siblings. So he waited while his father remained silent.
Neither Jabri’s forbearance nor his son’s would be rewarded. After Mohammed moved in March 2020 to boost oil production and crack down on dissent, detaining his uncle Ahmed as well as MBN, he had armed guards raid the home of Jabri’s two youngest children. They were put in jail without charges, their home ransacked and safes cracked in an apparent search for evidence to use against Jabri, leaving the family abroad to wonder what kind of progress Saudi Arabia had made since Mohammed came to power. In the five years since Salman had become king, Saad al-Jabri had seen himself promoted to one of the highest positions possible for a nonroyal, entrusted with the kingdom’s security and its relationship with its most important foreign ally, and just as quickly tarred as a terrorist, fired over Twitter, and driven into exile, his children held hostage while Mohammed trumpeted his reforms. Once the classic Saudi insider, he was now as confused as the foreigners who were trying to make sense of the kingdom and its fast-moving ruler. In the spring of 2020, the Jabri family would hire a Trump-connected lobbyist in a desperate effort to get the US government to pressure Mohammed to let the detained relatives leave Saudi Arabia.
All Mohammed’s plans for the year fell to the wayside in early 2020 as bad news out of China rippled around the globe. The novel coronavirus required the world economy to halt for months, while billions of people sheltered in place to stop the exponential spread of the virus and the collapse of medical systems. Weeks after his oil war pushed prices under $20 a barrel, close to a two-decade low, he agreed to rapidly cut back production following conversations with Jared Kushner, who also spoke with Russian counterparts about ending the disagreement. Mohammed’s oil-price war was killing US companies at a time when the global economy was shuddering.
Throughout the dispute, the US government suggested it might sanction Russia for its role in the price slump. But it handled Saudi Arabia through diplomatic channels and direct contact between the White House and Mohammed. Though the price war may have cost Saudi Arabia billions of dollars, Mohammed could at least be assured people were taking him seriously. The move was reminding the world how much power Mohammed had over global markets.
And as Saudis retreated into their homes for lockdowns like people across the globe, they were likely to find on Twitter and social media campaigns lauding their gracious king and his courageous son. Likewise, in places like the Philippines, Hungary, and China, criticism of dictatorial leaders was shunted aside to make way for emergency measures. Surveillance powers increased without protest, and governments became more powerful than ever, bailing out companies and handing out money to millions of unemployed people. This was no time for subtly nudging citizens through behavioral analysis—the most effective policy was ordering people indoors without giving them any choice in the matter.
Without even trying, Mohammed had stumbled into the new era like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It was a time of ascendance for strong leaders, even authoritarian ones. He ordered Mecca shut down and citizens indoors without debate, while he traveled with a group of close advisors to his family’s palace at NEOM. Nearby, tribe members were protesting their imminent move from their barren desert homeland to make way for the new city. Mohammed’s security forces cracked down, arresting some and fatally shooting one man, who is said to have been armed.
Through the night, the team talked about the years ahead. Forget the critics, they said. Mohammed had many years to prove his vision. He wasn’t even king yet. His legacy might come in ten, twenty, even thirty years.
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Acknowledgments
We are most indebted to our sources, many of whom remain anonymous to protect themselves against the risk of retaliation. Without their agreement to tell what they know, despite the risks, we would not have a book to write.
We would never have had the chance to delve so deeply into this topic if not for the urging and encouragement of editors at the Wall Street Journal, especially Elena Cherney, who spearheaded the newspaper’s early, agenda-setting coverage of the economic transition efforts and IPO of Aramco in the face of substantial headwinds. Mike Allen edited, and championed, those early stories. Other editors who played a pivotal role in our work—and other reporting—on Saudi Arabia are Charles Forelle, Alex Frangos, Ken Brown, Matthew Rose, Steve Yoder, Tammy Audi, Peter Wonacott, and Chris Stewart. We are thankful to Matt Murray for his strong stewardship of the newspaper as a whole and special attention to the Middle East. Bruce Orwall provided encouragement in moments of self-doubt.
We are also lucky to have talented and deeply sourced colleagues at the Journal. Summer Said, based in Dubai, is one of the most fearless and knowledgeable people in the Middle East about Saudi Arabia’s changes, its royal family, and the oil market. She has been generous and patient throughout this process. We have also been fortunate to work closely with Maureen Farrell, Keach Hagey, Kelly Crow, Josh Robinson, Warren Strobel, and Rory Jones.
Many experts have helped us learn more about the Al Saud dynasty, including family tree researcher Michael Field, Gulf States News research director Eleanor Gillespie, and longtime journalist and Saudi resident Robert Lacey. We were privileged to work with two phenomenal researchers, Lucy Woods in London and Kareem Shaheen in Toronto.
Stephen Kalin, a fierce competitor while at Reuters and new colleague at the Journal, provided feedback on the manuscript, as did good friends including Gabe Friedman, Steve Lefkowitz, Rob Guth, and Jenny Gross.
Thank you to our agent, Steve Troha, at Folio Literary Management. Paul Whitlatch encouraged us to pursue this topic and helped conceptualize this book, while Brant Rumble at Hachette Book Group thoughtfully edited it. We also thank the whole team at Hachette, including publisher Mary Ann Naples and associate publisher Michelle Aielli. Thank you to Jen Kelland for her deft copy editing, and Carolyn Levin and Kirsty Howarth for their legal guidance.
Lastly, we wouldn’t have been able to spend so much time traipsing around the world reporting or spending hour upon hour editing this book without help and guidance from our families, especially Farah Halime and Chelsea Dodgen.
Coauthored by Bradley Hope
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
Photos
Ibn Saud, the grandfather of Mohammed bin Salman and founder of Saudi Arabia’s ruling dynasty, as pictured in 1942. (Bob Landry/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
King Abdullah with then-prince Salman, father of Mohammed and long-serving governor of Riyadh, in 2007. (Hassan Ammar/AFP via Getty Images)
Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
(Bandar Al-Jaloud/Royal Court)
Turki bin Abdullah, son of the late King Abdullah, tried to see if the US government would support a coup of King Salman and his son Mohammed. (Dmitry Astakhov/AFP via Getty Images)
Former police official Turki Al Sheikh became a close associate of Mohammed bin Salman in his rise to power.
(Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)
Mohammed bin Salman and his father pushed Miteb bin Abdullah, another son of King Abdullah, out of the line of succession and later detained him in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh on corruption charges. (Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)
Mohammed bin Zayed, the day-to-day ruler of the United Arab Emirates and crown prince of Abu Dhabi, was an early supporter of Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power.
(Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images)
A horrifying crane accident in Mecca in 2015 caused a rift between Mohammed bin Salman and the construction company responsible, Saudi Binladin Group. (Ozkan Bilgin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
In the early days of King Salman’s reign, Mohammed bin Salman vied for influence with his older cousin Mohammed bin Nayef. President Barack Obama was reluctant to help empower the younger prince. (Olivier Douliery/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Mohammed bin Salman found an ally in Steve Bannon, chief strategist of President Donald Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Mohammed bin Salman connected well with Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra and Masayoshi Son with the Public Investment Fund’s Yasir al-Rumayyan. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with King Salman and President Donald Trump at the launch of Saudi counter-extremism center in Riyadh. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Council/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
