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By Root 599 0

and on weekends, he retreated to his desert ranch, where he raised ostriches. He wore the invariable Saudi garments: the ankle-length white gown, called a thobe, and a red-checked headscarf. The fundamentalists respected him because he was an Islamic scholar, but he was also an advocate of women’s rights, so the progressives saw him as a possible champion. He ran an intelligence service in the Middle East, which is usually a watchword for torture and assassination, but he had quickly gained a reputation for valuing clean hands. His father was the martyred king; his beloved mother, Effat, was the only woman in Saudi history ever called queen. All that, plus his youth and his important career, meant that Turki would have to be considered when the grandsons of Abdul Aziz finally have the opportunity to contend for the crown.

Outside the Kingdom, Turki lived a different life. He kept a house in London and an elaborate flat in Paris. He cruised the Mediterranean on his yacht, White Knight, one of several seagoing vessels he owned. In the drawing rooms of London and New York, he was known to favor the occasional banana daiquiri, but he was not a gambler or a lush. Because he fit comfortably into several different worlds, he had the quality of reflecting the virtues that others longed to see in him.

The CIA worked closely with Turki and his service during the Afghan jihad, and he had impressed the agency with his insight, the range of his knowledge, and his easy familiarity with American customs. There was an assumption on the part of some members of the U.S. intelligence community that Turki was Our Man in Riyadh, but others found him deceitful and reluctant to share information. These reactions mirrored the thorny relationship the Americans and the Saudis found themselves entangled in.

One Friday Turki went to a mosque in Riyadh where the imam had spoken out against certain female charitable organizations, including one that was overseen by five members of the Faisal family. Turki had listened to a tape recording of the sermon in which the imam had called the women running the charity whores. It was an astounding breach of the ancient bargain between Al Saud and the Wahhabi clergy. The following week Turki sat in the front row of the mosque, and when the imam rose to speak Turki furiously confronted him. “This man has defamed my family!” Turki shouted into the microphone. “My sisters! My daughter-in-law! Either he proves it, or I’m going to sue.” A witness to the event says that Turki actually threatened to kill the man on the spot.

The daring slander and Prince Turki’s furious response threw the country into turmoil. The governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, placed the offending imam under arrest. He quickly offered his apology, which Turki accepted. But Turki realized that the balance of power between the two factions had begun to shift. Many of his family members were cowed by the religious posse that roamed the malls and streets with policemen at their command. The super-piety of the muttawa was bound to focus itself on the conspicuous depravity of some members of the royal family; now, however, they had even attacked the charitable works of popular and upstanding princesses who sought to advance women’s causes. Clearly, the royal family could not abide such an insult, but the fact that such things were being said in public demonstrated that the muttawa were emboldened enough to preach revolution right under the noses of the ruling princes.

Like the CIA, Turki’s intelligence service was not supposed to operate inside the homeland; that was the province of Prince Naif, Turki’s truculent uncle, who ran the Interior Ministry and who jealously guarded his territory. Turki decided that the situation inside the country was too dangerous to be ignored, even if it meant intruding into Naif’s domain. He secretly began monitoring members of the muttawa. He learned that many of them were ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Quran in order to reduce their sentences. But they had become so powerful,