The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [88]
These murderous forays had an effect. With the brittle union in danger of breaking apart into civil war once again, the new president of the Republic of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, traveled to Saudi Arabia to plead with King Fahd to keep bin Laden under control. The king firmly instructed bin Laden to stay out of Yemen’s affairs. Bin Laden denied that he was involved, but soon he was back in Yemen, making more speeches and campaigning against the communists. The frustrated and irate Yemeni president returned to Saudi Arabia to press his case once again before King Fahd, who was unused to being disobeyed by his subjects, much less openly lied to. He turned to the family enforcer.
The minister of the interior, Prince Naif, an imperious figure often compared to J. Edgar Hoover, summoned bin Laden to his office. The ministry occupies a strangely unsettling building—an inverted pyramid—that looms on the perimeter of downtown Riyadh. Tubular black elevator columns rise inside the vast and disorienting marble atrium, which seems specially designed to diminish anyone who stands there. Bin Laden had reported to Naif in this building many times during the Afghan jihad, scrupulously keeping the government informed of his activities. He had always received respectful treatment in the past, due to his family, his status, and the loyalty to the royal family that he had displayed over the years.
This time was different. Naif spoke to him harshly and demanded his passport. The prince didn’t want to hear any more about bin Laden’s personal foreign policy.
It was a cold splash of reality, but bin Laden felt double-crossed. “I was working for the sake of the Saudi government!” he complained to his friends.
AS THE RICHEST COUNTRY in the region, surrounded by envious neighbors, Saudi Arabia was also the most anxious. When King Faisal commissioned the country’s first census in 1969, he was so shocked by how small the population actually was that he immediately doubled the figure. Since then, the statistics in the Kingdom have been distorted by this fundamental lie. By 1990 Saudi Arabia claimed a population of more than 14 million, nearly equal to that of Iraq, although Prince Turki privately estimated the Kingdom’s population to be a little over 5 million. Always fearful of being overrun and plundered, the Saudi government spent billions of dollars on weapons, buying the most sophisticated equipment on the market from the United States, Britain, France, and China and further enriching members of the royal family with lucrative kickbacks. In the 1980s the Kingdom built a $50 billion air-defense system; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moved its foreign headquarters from Germany to Saudi Arabia in order to construct bases, schools, and headquarters complexes for the Saudi army, air force, navy, and National Guard. After the U.S. Congress passed laws prohibiting American companies from participating in bribery and kickbacks with foreign agents, the Saudi government concluded the largest arms deal in history with Great Britain. By the end of the decade, the Kingdom should have been well equipped to defend itself against the immediate threats in its neighborhood. It had the weapons; all it lacked was training and troops—an actual army, in other words.
In 1990 bin Laden warned of the danger that the murderous tyrant in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, posed to Saudi Arabia. He was treated as a Cassandra. “I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf,” bin Laden lamented. “No one believed me.” Much of the Arab world was elated by Saddam’s anti-Western rhetoric and his threats to “burn half of Israel” with chemical weapons. He was especially popular in Saudi Arabia, which maintained cordial relations with its northern neighbor. Nonetheless, bin Laden continued his lonely campaign against Saddam and his secular Baath Party.
Once again the king was annoyed by bin Laden, a dangerous position for any Saudi subject to find himself in. The Kingdom had signed a non-aggression pact with