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With
Friends Like These
Reviewed by Thomas W. Lippman
SECRETS OF THE KINGDOM
The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection
By Gerald
Posner
Random
House. 254 pp. $24.95
 The
dust jacket of Gerald Posner's Secrets of the Kingdom calls it an
"explosive study" of Saudi Arabia. In 14 of its 15
chapters that's not true, but in chapter 10 it is -- literally.
There
Posner reports that Saudi Arabia has wired all of its major oil
facilities with interlocking Semtex explosive charges that can be
detonated from a single control point. Moreover, he says, the Saudis
have blended radioactive materials into the Semtex so that
detonation would not only destroy the facilities but also
contaminate them beyond repair.
| Why
would the Saudis set off what's essentially a networked dirty bomb
over their oil infrastructure? Because, according to Posner, they
want to make certain that nobody could benefit from invading their
country or taking down the ruling House of Saud. If the al Saud
family goes, Posner writes, the world's petroleum-based economy goes
with it. |
Posner,
the muckraking
author of nine previous
books, acknowledges
that he cannot be sure
this story is true. |
Posner,
the muckraking author of nine previous books, acknowledges that he
cannot be sure this story is true. And indeed a Saudi official has
questioned the credibility of the allegations. Posner attributes the
story to conversations among Saudi officials intercepted by the
National Security Agency and Israeli intelligence and compiled by
the NSA into a file called "Petro SE" -- for
"Petroleum Scorched Earth." It is possible, he concedes,
that the Saudis knew their conversations were being overheard and
concocted the doomsday scenario to ensure that the United States
would come to their aid in a crisis. "What better incentive for
Western powers, particularly the United States, to come to the aid
of the House of Saud if it were under external or internal
attack," Posner writes, "than to think that if it fell,
like the shah of Iran did a quarter century ago, they would take the
energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia with them" and cause
worldwide chaos?
| The
wealth of detail in Posner's account gives it an air of
credibility. Moreover, Saudi Arabia does have a Nuclear
Energy Research Institute, with scientists who are familiar
with radioactive materials such as cesium that could be used
in dirty bombs. Because (according to U.S. intelligence
reports) the kingdom financed the development of nuclear
weapons by Pakistan, it would have had access to nuclear
material, if only through the clandestine network of
Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. And while Saudi
Arabia is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, it has never agreed to an international inspection
protocol. |
The
wealth of detail
in Posner's account
gives it an air of
credibility.. ..On
other levels, though,
Posner's account
defies belief. |
On
other levels, though, Posner's account defies belief. Hundreds of
Americans work for Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, many in
senior positions and many with intelligence connections. Would none
of them have spotted this mammoth undertaking and reported it? Would
the Saudis really destroy facilities in Medina, a city so sacred
that non-Muslims are prohibited from going there? And who, in a
royal family that operates by consensus and spreads out
decision-making power among several senior princes, would have his
finger on the detonation button? Thinking that the House of Saud
would give absolute doomsday power to one individual runs contrary
to Saudi Arabia's history for the past half century.
|
Moreover,
if the story is true, what should the world do about it?
Posner does not say. Having rolled this grenade under the
reader's chair, so to speak, he just leaves it there. He
does note that Semtex has a shelf-life of about 20 years and
that the Saudis allegedly acquired their supply in the early
1990s -- which means that a few years from now the explosive
network (if it exists) will no longer be functional. What
are the implications of that? Posner says such questions can
usefully be addressed only after the Saudis have been
persuaded to allow international inspectors into the
facilities that supposedly have been wired to see whether,
in fact, they have been. Saudi officials and Americans
familiar with Saudi oil installations have greeted Posner's
account with derision. "The idea makes no sense, and
whoever wrote it has no credibility," Saudi Oil
Minister Ali Naimi said while in Washington earlier this
month.
Aside
from the chapter about the oil-field explosives, there isn't
much new in Secrets of the Kingdom . Readers who were
persuaded by the intimations of skullduggery in Craig
Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud , which reached a wide
audience via Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit
9/11," will find their suspicions reinforced; those who
take a more nuanced view of Saudi Arabia and U.S.-Saudi
relations are likely to find Posner's book a tendentious
rehash of old material, repackaged to put the kingdom in the
worst possible light. |
Readers
who were
persuaded by the
intimations of skullduggery in
Craig Unger's House
of Bush.. ..will find
their suspicions
reinforced; those
who take a more
nuanced view of
Saudi Arabia and
U.S.-Saudi relations
are likely to find
Posner's book a
tendentious rehash
of old material,
repackaged to put
the kingdom in the
worst possible light. |
We
can stipulate that Saudi Arabia has more than its share of odious,
reprehensible people, some of them with American blood on their
hands; that its social customs are sometimes alien to Western
sensibilities; that its human rights record is deplorable; that
business deals there have been landmarks of corruption; and that a
lot of Saudi money has supported bigotry and funded terrorism.
Posner reviews these issues but adds very little to our knowledge of
them. Except for the "Petro SE" material, he relies almost
entirely on secondary sources, drawing heavily from mainstream news
outlets and well-known earlier books. Mike Ameen, a longtime Aramco
executive, and Hermann Eilts, a former U.S. ambassador to the
kingdom, are quoted only from their remarks on a PBS documentary,
even though both men are easy to find.
The
result is a briskly written narrative that will shock anyone who has
been marooned on a desert island for 40 years but contains little
new for readers who have been paying attention. Here are stories
about Adnan Khashoggi, Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, various kings
and princes, and the puritanical Wahhabi religious establishment.
The controversial 1980 public television film "Death of a
Princess" surfaces here, and the 1981 fight over selling AWACS
planes, and the Carlyle Group, and the BCCI bank-fraud scandal and
the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. These are entertaining tales, but
often told.
| Some
of the supposedly new material is also flimsy. "The
9/11 Commission gave the Saudis a free pass," Posner
asserts in his opening chapter. "This book shows
why." But he neither establishes that a whitewash took
place nor explains why it allegedly occurred. To support his
charge, he offers an entire chapter about the extravagance
of Prince Mohammed bin Fahd and another about the global
business dealings of Prince al Waleed bin Talal. But the
former's excesses are well known, as are the latter's
business ventures, and Posner does not even suggest that
this information has anything to do with the work of the
9/11 Commission. Relying mostly on news reports, Posner
assembles a coherent narrative of Saudi funding of terrorist
groups, but he acknowledges that on this issue the 9/11
Commission did indeed go after the Saudis, noting in its
final report that "al Qaeda found fertile fund-raising
ground in Saudi Arabia." Posner includes a hair-raising
account of how the Saudis fund the distribution of extremist
literature and ideas inside the United States, but that
ground, too, has been extensively plowed, most notably in a
long report last December by Freedom House, a nonprofit
group that supports democracy abroad. |
Some
of the
supposedly new
material is also
flimsy. "The 9/11
Commission gave
the Saudis a free
pass," Posner asserts
in his opening chapter.
"This book shows
why." But he neither
establishes that a
whitewash took
place nor explains
why it allegedly
occurred. |
It
is understandable that Posner wanted to keep his manuscript secret
in hope of making news upon its release, but it would have benefited
from a good vetting by a reader more knowledgeable about Saudi
Arabia and the region. Such a reader would have caught the obvious
errors that pockmark the text. Posner writes that in 1957 King Saud
"was still smarting over the U.S.'s support of Israel in its
1956 war with Arab countries," when all Arabs know that Suez
was the one Arab-Israeli war in which Washington stood with them
against Israel. The Shatt al Arab is a waterway, not "a
disputed region of land." The Bedouin are not a single clan.
And Aramco's Mike Ameen would never have said of King Abdul Aziz ibn
Saud, the kingdom's founder, that "people who dealt with him
never considered him bright," as Posner reports. Ameen was
talking about Abdul Aziz's dimwitted son, Saud -- as he confirmed
when I called him, which Posner never did.
Posner's
best chapter is his last one, entitled "The Future?". The
question mark is apt. Posner gives a compelling summary of the
economic, social, educational and political choices facing Saudi
Arabia and its rulers and notes that there are "no easy
choices." As he observes, Saudi Arabia must make major changes
to satisfy the aspirations of its restless younger generation, but
"if it moves too quickly, it will destabilize the peace within
the fractious monarchy itself, especially when King Fahd dies and
succession again confronts the country." Well put. It's
regrettable that Posner didn't put his powers of observation to more
productive use in the rest of the book.
Thomas
W. Lippman, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, is the
author of "Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership
with Saudi Arabia."
[Mr.
Lippman's review originally appeared in the Washington Post on May
29, 2005 and is reprinted here with permission.]
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