Blood and Oil, page 5
It wasn’t just Salman. Ibn Saud once said that “to be a leader of men, a man has to receive an education in his own country, among his own people, and to grow up in surroundings steeped with the traditions and psychology of his countrymen.”
As governor of Riyadh, Salman had a lower international profile than some of his brothers, but he ruled over the central region called the Najd, ancestral homeland of the Al Saud tribe. He controlled real estate transactions, dealt with the religious leaders who propped up the ruling family, and presided over arrests and executions in Riyadh’s Deera Square, known as Chop Chop Square for its frequent beheadings. He disciplined wayward princes, mediated disputes between feuding family members, and was keeper of the family genealogy, tracing familial relations with Saudi tribes back generations.
Salman was also a standard-bearer for his family’s long allegiance with the Wahhabist religious establishment. He directed money to Islamic schools around the world. And he took a jaundiced view of the kingdom’s most important international relationship, harboring a belief that the Saudi-US alliance was essentially transactional and not the deep friendship that princes who focused on foreign policy professed to their American counterparts.
A US official based in Riyadh remembers the first time Salman summoned him to meet in his majlis, a cavernous room lined with long sofas where each week the prince accepted entreaties from members of the public. A staffer led the American into the space roughly half the size of a football field, with intricately woven rugs and a crystal chandelier.
Salman held court at the center of the back wall in a large chair. A line of petitioners sat to his right. The prince motioned for the diplomat to sit in a chair next to him. “You’re most welcome here,” he said. “I know Saudi Arabia and America will always have a special relationship.” As the diplomat thanked him, Salman interrupted with a caveat: “as long as you keep selling us your weapons.”
Another US official found himself sitting beside Salman, then Riyadh’s governor, at a Riyadh dinner during a visit by then–vice president Dick Cheney. While Cheney spoke with the king, Salman asked the official a question: “Would you like to know how I’ve managed to keep Riyadh for the last 40 years?”
“Sure,” the official replied.
“Every week I hold three majlis,” Salman said. “One for the religious scholars and two for the people. I even let the Bangladeshi street sweepers come. Because the day I don’t know what the Bangladeshi street sweepers think is the day we lose power.”
Some evenings, Mohammed would go out with friends into the desert and have staff make up tents and a fire. Frequent attendees were his younger brother Khalid and two cousins, Badr bin Farhan and Abdullah bin Bandar. They’d race four-wheelers in the dunes, set up soccer matches, and play video games. Eating fast food from McDonald’s or more traditional fare by the flames, Mohammed would tell them of his plans to become a billionaire. They’d talk about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, men who built enduring legacies by focusing on results and being shrewder than their competition. And he’d talk with charisma, mission, and mounting frustration and despair about the Saudi youth. “We are the ones who can decide the future of our generation,” he said one night, as an attendee remembered it. “If we don’t step up, who else will?”
Mohammed also had an early fascination with Alexander the Great, consuming history books about him and relishing his bold empire building. Some of his closest friends from that time would later refer to Mohammed as their “Iskander,” Arabic for Alexander.
One day, Abdulrahman al-Jeraisy, the septuagenarian owner of a Riyadh-based conglomerate that sells paper, telecom services, and furniture, got an unexpected message. Mohammed, Prince Salman’s son, wanted to borrow a million riyals, or about $250,000. It wasn’t quite arm-twisting, but it also wasn’t a request that Jeraisy could just brush aside. His family business was based in Riyadh, and Prince Salman governed the city. It was probably better to pay the $250,000 than deal with whatever trouble could arise from saying no. Fahd al-Obeikan, whose family owns a Riyadh manufacturing company, got a similar request. Only Mohammed wanted $500,000 from him. The industrialist ponied up alongside others.
The prince sank the money into stocks in the United States, and a few years later, when Saudi Arabia opened its own stock exchange, he invested there too. Called the Tadawul, it was an easy place to make money for a prince. There weren’t many companies on the market. Most were subject to government actions that someone who spent all day in the Royal Court could not help but absorb information on.
Mohammed also started creating companies of his own and acquiring stakes in others. He began a garbage-collection business and a group of real estate companies named after the scenic Tuwaiq escarpment southwest of Riyadh. He’d eventually hold shares in more than a dozen businesses in Saudi Arabia under his own name, something relatively rare in Saudi Arabia, where powerful people hold vast interests through proxies or confidential arrangements. The transparency was a sign of both earnestness and naivete.
The corporate registry shows Mohammed and his full brothers had a stake in a tech firm that got a coveted broadband license from the government, as well as ownership positions in fish farms, building developments, commodity trading, and restaurants. They had a Riyadh office park, and their holding company owned a firm that partnered with a Louisiana hospital to send Saudi patients to the United States for organ transplants.
Mohammed got into the real estate development business. One persistent problem Salman struggled with as Riyadh’s governor was land speculation. With money pouring into Riyadh, businessmen and members of the royal family would acquire undeveloped land and hold on to it in hopes of selling it at a big profit down the road, rather than developing it themselves.
Mohammed was focused on housing, a result of his work for his father. He began making deals with wealthy landowners: If they contributed a portion of land, he would find a developer to build houses on it. The developer and landowner would then co-own the new development. And Mohammed would get a percentage for his family. It worked well, since there was huge demand for new housing, and no landowner or construction company could comfortably say no to the son of Riyadh’s governor. It was a model he’d try to re-create later on a much grander scale.
Seeing some success at home, Mohammed began making foreign contacts. Knowing that more senior princes in the Royal Court had access to government surveillance information unavailable to him, Mohammed looked for ways to develop his own intelligence-gathering capabilities. Around 2006 he approached the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington, DC–based think tank that uses publicly available information to learn about illicit financing networks, and asked it to build a private institution with the prince’s own office. The think tank’s management declined.
The prince brought some foreign business contacts into his family home, welcoming them into intimate discussions of life and philosophy with Salman and his retinue. The teenager was now a towering young man who tended to sit off to the side, listening intently but not saying much. When he did interject, it was often with an anecdote from a history book or a religious text. During one Paris conversation about the nature of space and of God, Mohammed chimed in with an unexpected reference to a passage from the Koran. He was also married by now to a cousin, Sarah bint Mahshoor, and immediately they started having children. He’d eventually be father to two sons and two daughters.
From his reading of history, Mohammed came to see the world in terms of confrontation. He chafed at the idea that a power like the United States could exert control over Saudi Arabia in a way that harkened back to the colonial era. “He kind of had to have an enemy in his head, and the West was sort of the Romans, or the Byzantines. The Ottomans,” one confidant recalls. The Western powers, Prince Mohammed told him in the early 2000s, “are not doing well for us.”
These conversations made Mohammed, who spoke only in Arabic, seem more traditionally “Saudi” than his westernized older brothers. But Mohammed drew these men in with what one American calls “a magnetism” that made him want to get even closer to the prince. Mohammed, this man found, engendered loyalty through his father’s power and his own ambition, but more importantly through a politician’s knack for making the people he welcomed into his orbit feel special.
Translating that charm into business opportunity, Mohammed, through intermediaries, persuaded US mobile giant Verizon to bring fiber-optic infrastructure to Saudi Arabia. The deal, finalized in 2008, saw Verizon take a minority stake in a joint venture whose biggest partner was one of Mohammed’s many companies. Verizon’s legal department, headed by William Barr at the time, sent a lawyer, Verizon’s current chief counsel, Craig Silliman, to Saudi Arabia. Silliman sat down with Mohammed to finalize the deal. Barr later became the US attorney general.
The deal succeeded in building Mohammed’s reputation. “My son made millions for the family,” Salman boasted to one visitor after the deal closed. Government officials were happy because they’d been concerned that regional rivals were developing better fiber-optic networks than Saudi Arabia.
But Mohammed was still a young man and had little business experience. His company had none of the capabilities needed to carry through an international joint venture. About two years later, Verizon packed up and went home, writing off the investment as a loss.
Mohammed’s local enterprises were more successful and began to throw off millions of dollars, lessening his anxiety and contributing to a new war chest that would be necessary for showing largesse to important tribes and religious causes—all prerequisites to building a following that would support a bid by his father to become king.
But then Mohammed, still in his twenties, was investigated in relation to market shenanigans. Regulators had uncovered a suspicious pattern in the trading accounts of a group of princes, including Mohammed. Just before big announcements, they were making bets on stocks, netting major profits. Regulators suspected insider trading rather than lucky stock picking. The loser in the trades was often the government.
Saudi Arabia’s chief stock regulator at the time, Mohammed Al Shaikh, investigated. He grilled Mohammed and determined that a trader acting on the prince’s behalf, rather than Mohammed himself, was responsible for the irregularities. Al Shaikh advised him that it was better practice to put his stock portfolio in an investment fund.
The incident incensed King Abdullah, who issued a decree saying that even princes were not above market laws. Mohammed wasn’t named, but he was stung by the experience, and his position in the family took a fall.
He was impressed by Al Shaikh, chairman of the Capital Markets Authority and former White & Case lawyer, who had treated him firmly but respectfully, steering him away from trouble. He placed the law above stature, a sharp break from the old Saudi tradition of “the ruler knows best.” Al Shaikh had been educated in the United States and worked for the World Bank. The prince realized the man tasked with investigating him could one day be a powerful ally.
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Islamic leader Salman al-Ouda didn’t know what to make of the young prince sitting across from him in his living room in October 2012. He didn’t even know why Mohammed bin Salman, whom Ouda knew as a princeling of uncertain influence in the Royal Court, had invited himself over in the first place. Ouda would have politely turned the meeting down, but he had already rebuffed Mohammed once, about a year earlier, at a wedding. It wasn’t good practice to ignore the son of the crown prince.
So there was Mohammed, sipping coffee on the couch and talking about world history, while Ouda, one of the Muslim world’s most popular imams with more than thirteen million Twitter followers, sat listening. Mohammed shared his ideas about Islam, Arab leaders, and how a ruler should run a country. They struck Ouda as the shallow learnings of a recent graduate who hadn’t spent much time inside the library or outside the kingdom. Then Mohammed said something that got the cleric’s attention.
“My role model,” he declared, “is Machiavelli.”
Ouda remained silent. Mohammed’s attempt to earn respect with his knowledge, rather than his birthright, impressed the cleric. But the substance of the message was troubling. This prince was quoting The Prince; it augured tumultuous times for the kingdom and later for Ouda himself.
By that time Mohammed, whose wide girth and hot temper and the scruffy beard running down his throat had earned him the nickname “Stray Bear” from his enemies, had been gaining a reputation up and down the royal family for having a sharp edge. In one oft-recounted story, always told with a new variation, he sent a bullet to a land official who had declined to give him title to a plot he demanded—gaining him another nickname, Abu Rasasa, or “Father of the Bullet.”
Even in his official work, Mohammed established a reputation for pushing around powerful relatives. Showing up with buses full of Filipino workers, he told his own aunt, one of the wives of the late King Fahd, that she was being evicted from a palace needed for new purposes. The power would be disconnected by midnight, he told her. This was especially bracing in Saudi culture, where age and rank are held in the highest regard.
During late-night banter, well-to-do Saudis like to point to Mohammed’s tribal heritage on his mother’s side, suggesting that his character traits traced back to his Bedouin blood. His mother, Fahdah, hails from the Ajman tribe in the northeast of Saudi Arabia. Its most famous member is Rakan bin Hithlain, a revered fighter during the Ottoman era. On the other side, Ibn Saud, Mohammed’s grandfather, was the consummate desert warrior: six foot, four inches tall; lusty; strategic; and bold. Mohammed was the convergence of those two lines. It was folklore, but it would be important later in creating a mythical backstory for young Saudis looking to champion a reformer prince speaking directly to their demographic.
Within the Al Saud family, Mohammed became known as ambitious and self-assured—and protected by his powerful father, Prince Salman.
In 2011, Salman’s brother Sultan, the minister of defense for forty-eight years, died. Salman assumed the role, marking a major shift of power. The Sultan clan’s control of the army gave it great power and huge amounts of money. Transferring it to Salman gave an already influential prince a new power base. Soon after, Salman made Mohammed an advisor to the military.
The young prince, still in his twenties, started ordering around senior princes who had been officers for years, including sons of the prior defense minister and King Abdullah. He finally crossed a line one day when he started berating a cousin some thirty years his senior, a prince named Khalid bin Bandar who had served as a general for years. The senior prince refused to take orders from Mohammed, who became angry.
By that time four senior military officers, all princes, one of them King Abdullah’s son, had quit because of Mohammed, and the king knew he had to rein in the young upstart. He summoned Mohammed to his vacation home in Tangier. But when Mohammed arrived, he didn’t get the stern warning Abdullah would usually give. Instead the king had Tuwaijri, his Royal Court chief, dress him down. It was humiliating. Tuwaijri was basically a servant, as far as Mohammed was concerned, and here he was talking down to the grandson of Ibn Saud. He returned to Riyadh and told his father about the incident.
Salman, who was crown prince in addition to defense minister at the time, was even more upset than his son. He called Abdullah and told the king that Mohammed was acting on his behalf, and if the king didn’t like it, Salman would resign. Abdullah backed down, and Mohammed resumed his place in the ministry.
From his time sitting in the majlis with his father, day after day, he also learned the inner workings of power in Saudi Arabia. Salman had vulnerabilities, he realized, and it was up to him to protect his father and the family lineage.
Salman, then in his seventies, was in line to inherit the throne, but like Abdullah he suffered from health problems. After back surgery, he became addicted to painkillers. They made him bad-tempered and forgetful, traits Khalid al-Tuwaijri and his allies looked to use against him in the months leading up to King Abdullah’s death.
Mohammed set to work on beating the addiction, staying up with his father around the clock and handing him pills identical to those he’d been taking for years. Only they were actually new ones specially ordered up by Mohammed with lower doses. Over a matter of weeks, he’d helped his father emerge from a long torpor. The two, already close, used their time together to talk of Saudi Arabia’s ills and ideas for shaking things up.
“Notice anything different about the crown prince,” Mohammed asked a family friend not long after. “Yes,” the friend replied. “He wasn’t yelling at me all the time.” Mohammed gave his trademark grin, so big it forced his eyes nearly shut.
Foreigners were only just starting to notice the ambitious new face in the Al Saud family starting in 2011 and 2012. The clubby Gulf States Newsletter, written by former diplomats, spooks, and other prince watchers, reported on him overseeing a ceremony for the National Association of Retired Persons in Riyadh on March 21, 2011, when his father was still the governor. “The usually low-profile prince has recently had a more visible public presence,” one news brief read. “Observers note that Prince Mohammed is regarded as particularly ambitious, with an eye on the governorship and control of other government entities.”
That ambition was mostly focused on the economy, something Mohammed saw as his expertise after his dalliances in business and markets. He surrounded himself with a coterie of advisors with backgrounds in economics, business, and law. They spent hours spitballing and writing out what would later be the key thrusts of the National Transformation Plan and Vision 2030 for Saudi Arabia, attempts to shift the economy away from oil in just two decades. Few of the ideas were innovative, but in the context of the country’s history of resisting change, they were revolutionary. Saudi Arabia was so change averse, it didn’t outlaw slavery until 1962 under pressure from President John F. Kennedy.
