The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [48]
From the safe distance of America, Turki followed the tumult in his country, including the financial rescue by Mohammed bin Laden—a timely gesture that allowed Faisal to reorganize and stabilize the Kingdom during a period of rising Arab socialism, when the royal family might well have been overthrown. The bond between the royal family and the bin Ladens was particularly strong with the children of King Faisal. They would never forget the favor that bin Laden had done for their father when he assumed the throne.
After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, the entire Arab world sank into a state of despondency. Turki became so depressed that he began skipping classes, then had to make up the work in summer school. One of his classmates, a gregarious young man from Arkansas named Bill Clinton, spent four hours coaching him for an ethics test. It was August 19, Clinton’s twenty-first birthday. Turki got a B in the class, but he dropped out of Georgetown soon afterward without finishing his undergraduate degree. He continued taking courses at Princeton and Cambridge but was never really motivated to graduate.
Finally, in 1973, he returned to the Kingdom and went to ask his father what he should do next. The king understood him to be seeking a job. He raised his right eyebrow up to the sky and said, “Look, I didn’t give any of your brothers a job. Go look for your own job.” Of course, the king’s youngest son had little to concern himself with, since his place in life was already assured by his family’s immense wealth and his father’s firm grip on the affairs of the Kingdom. Turki’s maternal uncle, Sheikh Kamal Adham, offered him a post in the Foreign Liaison Bureau. “I had no interest in intelligence,” Turki said. “I didn’t even realize the job was in the intelligence field. I thought it had something to do with diplomacy.” Quiet-spoken and intellectual, he seemed more suited to a profession that relied on ceremonial dinners and cordial negotiations on the tennis court than one that called on the darker skills. He married Princess Nouf bint Fahd al-Saud, from a neighboring branch of the royal family, and settled into a life of wealth that only a handful on the planet could match. But the plates of history were shifting, and the blissful existence he enjoyed was drifting toward a cataclysm.
PRINCE TURKI RETURNED to his homeland at a fateful juncture. Many Saudis were unprepared for the abrupt transformation that their culture had endured since the first oil boom. In their own lifetimes, they remembered a country that was starkly fundamental in every aspect. Most Saudis in the 1950s lived as their ancestors had lived two thousand years before. Few actually thought of themselves as Saudi, since the concept of nationality meant little to them, and government occupied practically no place in their lives. They were tribesmen without boundaries. The enforced equality of poverty and meager expectations had created a society as horizontal as the desert floor. Tribal codes of behavior, coupled with the injunctions of the Quran, had governed individual thought and action. Many, perhaps the majority, had never seen an automobile or a foreigner. There was little education beyond the ritual memorization of the Quran, and scarce need for more. The essential experience of living on the Arabian Peninsula was that nothing changed. The eternal and the present were one and the same.
Suddenly into this desert rushed a flood of change: roads, cities, schools, expatriate workers, dollar bills, and an overriding new awareness