By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 6, 2001; Page A01
In a fiery speech broadcast on Saudi state television Sunday, Crown Prince Abdullah accused the U.S. media of conspiring to damage Saudi Arabia's reputation and to drive a wedge between Riyadh and Washington.
Even President Bush was angered by media reports that the Saudis were not fully cooperating in the war against terrorism, said Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader in place of ailing King Fahd. "President Bush phoned me. He began the conversation by saying that he was sorry," Abdullah recounted. Bush, Abdullah said, told him, " 'We will not accept this and I will not accept it, and most American people will not accept it.' "
But the high-level reassurance, and repeated administration statements of satisfaction with the Saudi effort, have failed to quell criticism from Congress and elsewhere in the United States of Riyadh's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Among the most frequent complaints is that Saudia Arabia has balked at providing military facilities for the anti-terrorism campaign and has been less than zealous in tracking down possible terrorists and their money inside the kingdom.
The alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia has prospered for years despite enormous differences between the world's oldest democracy and the secretive, religion-based monarchy that is America's largest oil supplier. The Saudis provide energy stability and a strategic regional foothold for U.S. military forces. The Americans offer superpower protection against incursive neighbors such as Iraq and do not belabor the absence of political and religious freedom in the kingdom.
But the deaths of about 4,600 people in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which U.S. officials have charged were planned by a Saudi-born extremist and carried out by more than a dozen Saudi citizens, have strained ties as never before. The combination of Saudi reticence and U.S. solicitude that has long characterized the relationship has now fueled allegations that Riyadh's anti-terrorist effort is lacking.
The daily bombardment of Afghanistan by U.S. fighter jets and heavy bombers illustrates one part of the challenge. The United States draws up target lists and controls the movement of all warplanes in Afghan airspace from a sophisticated operations center 1,000 miles away at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh.
Yet the Bush administration, despite its eagerness to defend the Saudis against criticism, rarely speaks about the center's crucial role in the air war. And the Saudis, while irritated at the accusations they are not pulling their weight, never mention it.
Touting the command and control activities being carried out at the base might make the Saudis "heroes in Washington," explained Saudi foreign policy adviser Adel al-Jubeir. "But we may suffer consequences in the Muslim world. Our challenge has always been: How do you balance between the two? Given a choice, we'd rather look good in downtown Riyadh than downtown Washington. The senior levels of your government appreciate this, they understand this, and they cut us some slack on it."
Although U.S. law enforcement agencies have identified 15 of the 19 men who participated in the Sept. 11 attacks as Saudi citizens, their government has said none of them was recruited inside Saudi Arabia by the al Qaeda network headed by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. A few Saudi citizens may have been "brainwashed" elsewhere, Interior Minister Prince Nayef said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
After a meeting of regional interior ministers last week in Bahrain, Nayef said his government had "neither arrested nor detained any person" in the Sept. 11 attacks.
On the financial front, although neither Washington nor Riyadh acknowledged it until last week, the Saudi government ordered financial institutions to block terrorist assets on Oct. 13, the day after the Treasury Department released a list of suspects that included two charitable organizations and one individual in Saudi Arabia. But both governments remain equivocal about whether the Saudis have actually found or frozen terrorist funds.
Asked at a news conference last week what actions the Saudis had taken, Jimmy Gurule, undersecretary of the treasury for enforcement, said, "I don't think we should become so fixated on the blocking of assets. What's important is cooperation."
Those evasions have provoked pointed questions in Congress, along with more broader assertions that the undemocratic nature of the Saudi government, its strict interpretation of Islam and its religion-based educational system may actually encourage Islamic-based terrorism against the West.
"They've been playing . . . kind of a double game here," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said recently on NBC's "Meet the Press." "They've satisfied their extremists within their own societies . . . [and] also financed some of these organizations." Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), on the same program, said the United States "can't tolerate a nation like the Saudis -- whose government, in many ways, continues to stand because we support them -- to promulgate that hatred."
Nayef, who is among the most influential members of the Saudi royal family, said such comments are part of a campaign in the United States to denigrate Saudi Arabia.
Abdullah has been even more scathing. "The ferocious campaign by the western media against the kingdom is only an expression of its hatred toward the Islamic system" and Saudi Arabia's religious practices, he said in a recent speech, according to the Arab News, an English language daily.
Al-Jubeir, who works for Abdullah and has spent the past week in Washington making appearances on U.S. television and at congressional hearings, said it was ludicrous to imagine that Riyadh would not want to use every available weapon against al Qaeda. Bin Laden's hatred of the United States, he said, pales beside his hatred of the Saudi government.
"These guys are out to get us, not you," he said. "You're the soft target."
His government, al-Jubeir added, has gone out its way to condemn the Sept. 11 attacks and is puzzled by the reaction in some quarters of the United States. "The king has condemned it, along with every senior official," he said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has publicly credited the Saudis with intelligence assistance, and Brent Scowcroft, chairman of Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, said the Saudis "are cooperating. Quietly."
"They're scared," Scowcroft said. "Osama bin Laden is a Saudi."
The bilateral relationship has long been based on give-and-take, said Scowcroft, who was President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. At that time, he said, "we tried to accommodate to their concerns in keeping our soldiers out of town and so forth. But they also cooperated by giving us military bases on Saudi soil. We had 500,000 troops there."
The FBI privately seethed when the Saudis balked at U.S. attempts to investigate the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. service members. When a U.S. grand jury last summer indicted 13 Saudi fugitives for the crime, Riyadh ruled out any extraditions. But little was said in public.
The administration's insistence that it could not be happier with Saudi cooperation in the current anti-terrorist effort is intended in large part to reassure the Saudis themselves. In his own recounting of Bush's Oct. 25 call to Abdullah, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The president noted that he is very pleased with the kingdom's contributions."
The Bush administration believes that much of al Qaeda's funding is funneled through organizations that provide humanitarian aid to Muslims around the world. Much of the money for those organizations, Treasury officials have said, comes from wealthy Saudis. The Saudis have responded that tithing for those less fortunate is one of the five pillars of Islam and that if some of the money goes astray, it is only after it leaves the kingdom and passes through European and U.S. banks.
Saudi domestic political and religious concerns are often difficult for U.S. officials to decipher. Reports of a rift between the straight-laced Abdullah and his more westernized and pro-U.S. relatives in high positions have been fueled recently by the unexplained, weeks-long absence from Washington of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
Bandar, the son of the defense minister, has been the most direct U.S. pipeline to the Saudi government since his appointment here in 1983. Depending on whom one talks to, he is either seriously "out of favor" with Abdullah and lying low in Europe, recovering from an illness, or engaged in high-level consultations in Riyadh.
But the administration has its own domestic politics to deal with. Peppered with senators' questions about why the administration should support a monarchy that allows no freedom of political thought or religion, Powell cryptically agreed that "unto dust thou shalt return the day you stop representing the street."
"When you don't have a free democratic system, where the street is represented in the halls of the legislature and in the executive branches of those governments, then they have to be more concerned by the passions of the street," Powell said. He added that he had "started to raise these issues and talk to some of our friends in the region and say, you know, in addition to sort of criticizing us from time to time . . . [you] better start taking a look in the mirror."
Correspondent Howard Schneider in Riyadh contributed to this report.