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By Root 552 0

young idealist returned to the Kingdom with a sense of divine mission. He had risked death and had been, he thought, miraculously spared. He had gone as an acolyte of an iconic Muslim warrior, and he returned as the undisputed leader of the Arab Afghans. He had a commanding air of confidence, which was all the more seductive because of his instinctive humility. In a time when Saudis were increasingly uncertain about their identity in the modern world, bin Laden appeared as an unsullied archetype. His piety and humble manner reminded Saudis of their historic image of themselves as shy and self-effacing, but also fierce and austere. Some of his young admirers called him “the Othman of his age,” a reference to one of the early caliphs, a wealthy man known for his righteousness.

Inevitably, bin Laden’s fame cast an unwelcome light on the behavior of the Saudi royal family, led by King Fahd, who was known for his boozing and carousing in the ports of the French Riviera, where he docked his 482-foot yacht, the $100 million Abdul Aziz. The ship featured two swimming pools, a ballroom, a gym, a theater, a portable garden, a hospital with an intensive-care unit and two operating rooms, and four American Stinger missiles. The king also liked to fly to London in his $150 million 747 jet, equipped with its own fountain. He lost millions in the casinos on these excursions. One night, upset with the curfew imposed by British gaming laws, he hired his own blackjack and roulette dealers so that he could gamble in his hotel suite all night long. Other Saudi princes enthusiastically followed his example, notably King Fahd’s son Mohammed, who accepted more than $1 billion in bribes, according to British court documents, which he spent on “whores, pornography; fleets of more than 100 high-performance cars; palaces in Cannes and Geneva; and such luxuries as powerboats, chartered jets, ski-chalets, and jewelry.”

Oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, sending the Saudi economy into a deficit, but the royal family continued taking massive personal “loans” from the country’s banks, which they rarely repaid. Every substantial business deal required “commissions”—kickbacks—to the royal mafia to lubricate the agreement. Individual princes confiscated land and muscled in on private businesses; this was in addition to the secret, but substantial, monthly allowance that each member of the family received. “Al Saud” became a byword for corruption, hypocrisy, and insatiable greed.

The attack on the Grand Mosque ten years before, however, had awakened the royal family to the lively prospect of revolution. The lesson the family drew from that gory standoff was that it could protect itself against religious extremists only by empowering them. Consequently, the muttawa, government-subsidized religious vigilantes, became an overwhelming presence in the Kingdom, roaming through the shopping malls and restaurants, chasing men into the mosques at prayer time and ensuring that women were properly cloaked—even a strand of hair poking out from under a hijab could rate a flogging with the swagger sticks these men carried. In their quest to stamp out sinfulness and heresy, they even broke into private homes and businesses; and they waged war on the proliferating satellite dishes, often shooting at them with government-issued weapons from government-issued Chevrolet Suburbans. Officially known as representatives of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the muttawa would become the models for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

PRINCE TURKI PRESENTED a striking contrast to the public image of the royal family. Courteous, charming, and soft-spoken, he was the kind of man many people knew and liked; but he was also guarded and private, and he kept the various parts of his life so carefully separated that no one knew him well. He enjoyed the royal prerogatives of power, but within the Kingdom he lived in an appealingly humble manner. He occupied a comparatively modest, one-story house in Riyadh with his wife, Princess Nouf, and their six children;