Apparent Role of Saudis Draws Scrutiny to Kingdom's Tensions

By Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 21, 2001; Page A15

A deepening and increasingly visible relationship between the Saudi royal family and the U.S. military since the 1991 Persian Gulf War has inflamed anti-American passions within the country's influential Islamic establishment and particularly within Saudi Arabia's radical anti-government fringe. According to Saudi and U.S. sources, the friction over this relationship may have led to unprecedented involvement by Saudi individuals in the Sept. 11 suicide attacks in New York and Washington.

While some of the hijackers were non-Saudis who apparently used stolen Saudi identity papers, at least four of the 19 suspects appear to be real Saudis, according to a Saudi source who has been in contact with officials in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The families of a number of suspects using Saudi names and documents have been unable to contact them since the attacks, he said.

Although Saudi nationals have been involved in terrorist bombings against U.S. targets before in Saudi Arabia -- notably in 1995 and 1996 -- the attacks of Sept. 11 appear to mark the first Saudi participation in such attacks outside the kingdom or using the suicide tactics that have been a hallmark of terrorism in Lebanon and Israel.

Five of the suspects used the names Alghamdi or Alshehri, which are common among two tribes in southwestern Saudi Arabia where Islamic militants are particularly strong. A dissident Islamic cleric, Safar Hawali, who was released from house arrest in June 1999 with two other radical clerics, has family roots and many followers in that region.

Saudi officials emphasized that they have yet to establish or receive conclusive proof that nationals from their country were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. The chief information official of the Saudi Embassy in Washington said Wednesday that most, if not all, the suspects used stolen identities.

But U.S. officials have identified as their chief suspect Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born fugitive who has consistently railed against the same American military presence in Saudi Arabia that so upsets many other Muslim activists in the kingdom. U.S. law enforcement officials have said they are questioning a number of Saudi pilots as part of an investigation into the attacks and are holding a Saudi doctor as a material witness.

These developments have refocused attention on internal problems in America's closest Persian Gulf ally after a period in which anti-government and anti-U.S. agitation seemed to have subsided. "This is going to begin an international scrutiny of the domestic situation in Saudi Arabia," said Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi oil and security analyst.

Saudi authorities in the past have resisted such scrutiny, drawing criticism from the FBI, for instance, for refusing to allow U.S. agents to interview suspects in the bombing of an American military installation.

Saudi and U.S. analysts said the United States is poorly prepared to assess on its own the strength of the radical Islamic movement within the Saudi power structure, having failed to develop a relationship with the religious community commensurate with its interlocking connections to the Saudi military, government and royal family. According to a non-classified version of a study done by Obaid for the State Department in May 1998, "U.S. intelligence on Saudi Arabia suffers from misunderstanding the radical nature and underestimating the power of the religious establishment."

Crown Prince Abdullah,who has taken over day-to-day governing from the ailing King Fahd, has been credited by several scholars and analysts with defusing religious discontent that swept the kingdom in the mid-1990s. The unrest led to a bombing in Riyadh in November 1995 that killed five Americans and two Indians, and the truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments in Dhahran that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, among other incidents,. But in the last several years, the violence and Islamic-based anti-government tension appear to have subsided.

"Abdullah has been a key factor in relieving fundamentalist pressure on the Saudi government because his own personal piety and behavior are beyond question," said Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to the kingdom who now is president of the Middle East Policy Council. But he added that the government "has a major security problem and it understands this."

Internal stability in Saudi Arabia is crucial for long-term U.S. security interests. The kingdom serves as a military bulwark against Iraq, a counterweight to Iran and the key piece in a loose U.S.-backed military alliance of Arab states along the Persian Gulf.

Since the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has shifted from its role as a large oil supplier to becoming the principal U.S. ally and economic partner in the region. In the 1970s and 1980s, it bolstered the international banking system with its oil revenue. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution the same year, Saudi Arabia turned to the United States for modern weapons, including F-15s, AWACS surveillance planes, helicopters, transport planes, tanks and air defense weapons, including Patriot and Hawk missiles. In 1991, it served as the main staging ground for U.S. forces that drove Iraq from Kuwait.

Since 1981, U.S. construction companies and arms suppliers have earned more than $50 billion in Saudi Arabia, according to the Congressional Research Service. More than 30,000 Americans are employed by Saudi companies or joint U.S.-Saudi ventures and U.S. investments in the country reached $4.8 billion in 2000, according to the Commerce Department. The U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. recently was chosen by the Saudi government to lead two of three consortiums developing gas projects worth $20 billion to $26 billion.

"What started as a military pillar to resist Soviet incursion into the region has become an uncomfortable commitment to the interests of a royal family that has become increasingly unpopular with younger Islamic clerics and Saudi nationalists," said Scott Armstrong, a Washington journalist who is preparing a book on the U.S.-Saudi security relationship.

Scholars say these developments -- in particular the continued stationing of an estimated 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War and the use of Prince Sultan Air Base at Al Kharj to patrol and bomb southern Iraq -- upset a delicate balance within the Saudi power structure. While the royal family continued to view U.S. forces as essential for security, bin Laden's charges that American "crusader forces" were occupying the homeland of Islam's holiest shrines at Mecca and Medina found a receptive audience in some Saudi religious circles.

Simultaneously, a downturn in the Saudi economy starting in the late 1980s resulted in fewer Saudis studying abroad and more attending religious schools at home, according to Daniel Brumberg, associate professor of government at Georgetown University. "The result has been a young, disgruntled generation of Saudis with little exposure to the West, who imbibed the fundamentalist rhetoric and worldview," he said. "There was a constituency for the rhetoric of resentment."

Wahabism -- the main Saudi school of Islam based on a strict, austere interpretation of the Koran -- has been the "glue" holding Saudi Arabia together since its founding, scholars note. While secular authority has been vested in a family dynasty founded by the Al-Saud clan, the royal family and the religious leaders have been "joined at the hip," according to Mamoun Fandy, a resident lecturer at the National Defense University.

Members of the key religious organizations, such as the Council of the Assembly of Senior Ulema,and the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue, are appointed by the king. But below them is a Muslim establishment in which younger, militant clerics have become increasingly emboldened since 1991 to criticize the presence of "foreign infidels." Sheik Salman Audah, one of the dissident clerics, distributed tapes of sermons comparing members of the royal family to the last sultans of the Ottoman Empire.

Bin Laden, say scholars, developed a close relationship with a number of these clerics after returning from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. Several have at least condoned, if not outright advocated, violence on behalf of the cause of purifying Islam in Saudi Arabia.

There are an estimated 12,000 to 25,000 Saudi Islamic militants known as "Afghanis" because they fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, according to Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist on the Persian Gulf at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.