The Rise And Fall Of Saudi Prince Bandar

by Jim Lobe

Prince Bandar bin Sultan enjoys a 1999 sporting event

In the 1980s, he was treated as a comrade-in-arms in the war against communism at the home of CIA director William Casey, as honored guest at banquets of neo-conservatives celebrating the "Reagan Doctrine," and he was the toast of Ronald Reagan himself in the White House dining room.

Now, just over a decade later, his wife is accused by powerful senators and media of supporting terrorism; his country is charged with "duplicity" in the war against al-Qaeda; and increasingly shrill calls for the overthrow of his family's rule are proliferating across Washington.

Worst of all, many of the same people who treated him as a hero under former president Reagan and who still extol those years as a glorious epoch in U.S. foreign policy now say his kingdom should be treated as a sworn enemy of the United States, and even become a target of a revived Reagan Doctrine to oust unfriendly regimes.

It all seems so unfair. Thank heaven for loyal friends like the former President George H.W. Bush, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who still defend the kingdom and even call when times are tough.

Take the recent big news: based initially on leaks from Congressional committees that Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, authorized regular payments over four years to two Saudi families in California, one of whom reportedly helped find lodgings for two of the 15 Saudi hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

While no evidence has surfaced that either Bandar, his wife, or the families who received the funds ever knew that the men were part of al-Qaeda, the stories have nonetheless sparked a new wave of denunciations about the alleged perfidy of the Saudi royal family in the war on terrorism.

Frank Gaffney, president of the right-wing Center for Security Policy (CSP) and a senior Pentagon official under Reagan, said the incident was just one more indication of what he called a "Saudi double-game -- declaring its support for us in fighting terrorism while providing indispensable financing and other assistance needed for al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks to operate globally."

While Gaffney's attack was particularly incendiary, other Iraq hawks, including Republican Sen. John McCain and neo-conservative Democrat and former vice-presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, have seized on the alleged failure of the CIA and FBI to thoroughly investigate such links as "very serious." Warned Lieberman: "either (the Saudis) have to change or the relationship we have with Saudi Arabia is going to change dramatically."

Soon even the White House, which publicly has insisted that Riyadh remains a staunch U.S. ally, was leaking word that it, too, was dissatisfied with the kingdom's performance in the war on terrorism, and was even considering issuing some kind of formal ultimatum about cracking down on al-Qaeda supporters and sponsors there.

This brouhaha over Princess Haifa marks the latest in a series of episodes since Sept. 11 in which prominent right-wing voices in Congress and the media -- most of them closely associated with the neo-conservative political appointees in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney -- have depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy in the war on terrorism.

The strongest attacks have been carried out by lawmakers and media, including the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard, as well as in the columns of prominent neo-conservative commentators, such as Gaffney and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, with close ties to Israel's Likud Party, which has long seen Riyadh's alliance with Washington as a strategic threat.

As in Gaffney's column, Riyadh has been depicted as either in league with al-Qaeda -- a notion that is dismissed out of hand by Mideast specialists who point out that al-Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, is a sworn enemy of the royal family -- or unwilling to crack down against bin Laden's followers and sponsors.

A third theme -- that the regime's authoritarian and reactionary nature created a fanatical opposition and should be overthrown for that reason -- has also figured prominently in the attacks.

Two leading neo-conservatives close to both Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, called for the administration to apply the Reagan Doctrine -- used in the 1980s to oust pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World - "not only in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but also in, for example, China and Saudi Arabia".

The notion that Saudi Arabia should be the target of a new Reagan Doctrine must be particularly hurtful to Bandar and the Saudis. After all, they served as the "great milk cow," as one former official called it, for Reagan's illicit efforts to overthrow unfriendly governments. As ambassador here, Bandar became "go-to" man with the cash.

The Saudis not only provided billions of dollars to the mujahadin in their efforts to oust Soviet troops in Afghanistan, they also helped sustain South Africa-backed Unita rebels in Angola with tens of millions of dollars at a time when Congress banned all U.S. support.

They kept the Nicaraguan Contras alive with some $30 million after Congress cut them off. "The Saudis financed the Reagan Doctrine on three continents," according to Peter Kornbluh, an expert on the period at the National Security Archive.

While all of these operations -- and many more -- were necessarily kept secret at the time, when they became public during the Iran-Contra affair, the Saudis received accolades from those who now want them out, beginning with the Wall Street Journal.

Do the Journal's editorial writers forget that Bandar provided three million dollars so that Casey could finance the "off-the-books" assassination of a Hizbollah leader in Lebanon?

And that when the car bomb that had been rigged for the intended target exploded prematurely, killing 80 innocent people in a Beirut suburb, it was also Bandar who arranged to pay Hizbollah two million dollars in food, university scholarships, and other goods in exchange for the group's agreement not to attack U.S. targets in Lebanon.

"It was easier to bribe him than to kill him," Bandar later told the Washington Post's Bill Woodward.