Prince Bandar Last Updated: October 08, 2008
Since he first arrived in the United States in 1983, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulazziz of
Saudi Arabia has been a key player in four presidential administrations, and
personal/business colleague of several powerful US figures, none more so than
members of the Bush family.
Never explained, however, is the string of
checks from his wife, more than $60,000, that paid US living expenses for two of the
911 hijackers.
Bandar served as the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. for 22
years, and brokered several major deals between the two countries, including covert
Iran/Contra exchanges, advanced weapons sales, US troop deployment during the first
Iraq war, and payments to Libya to end its WMD buildup.
He was said to show
up unannounced, for late-night White House meetings, toting bags of Big Macs. He was
a racquetball partner of Colin Powell, invited the Cheney family to his daughter’s
wedding.and former President George H.W. Bush was a fishing buddy. He was always the
congenial conduit finessing the Royals requirements with the requests of
Washington’s power elite.
Although almost universally liked in Washington
circles, Bandar lost much of his public luster after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which
15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.. Just days later however, Bandar was the
Saudi key man to get the Bin Laden family and other royals out of the country. The
Saudi royal family was named in a lawsuit filed by relatives of 9/11
victims,accusing the Saudis of financial support of Al Qaeda.
Then it
was learned that Bandar’s wife had funneled tens of thousands of dollars to a San
Diego couple who’d hosted two of the hijackers throughout most of 2000.
In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward reported that Bandar was
given an early warning about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, even before Colin Powell was
informed. As the U.S. prepared for war in early 2003, Bandar took a lead role in
negotiations between the Bush administration and Saudi officials over securing bases
and staging grounds. After the invasion, Bandar pledged to protect the world economy
from oil shocks by manipulating Saudi oil supply, the White House said in 2004,
according to The New York Times. Though he later denied a report published in
Woodward’s book that he had promised to stabilize oil prices in time for Bush’s 2004
re-election campaign.
Bandar is the grandson of the late king Abdul Aziz, the
founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who initiated his country's historic
oil-for-security relationship with the United States when he met Franklin D.
Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on Feb. 14, 1945. He was born an
illegitimate son of Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who was one of the seven sons of Abdul
Aziz and his favorite wife. Though scarcely acknowledged by his own father, Bandar
caught the attention and admiration of his uncle, King Fahd. After studying in the
United States and Britain, and flying fighter jets for the Saudi Air Force, Bandar
found himself in Washington D.C., where, in 1978, he helped President Jimmy Carter
persuade Congress to approve a $2.5 billion sale of 60 F-15 fighter
jets.
Then, when Carter needed King Fahd to push down oil prices, he sent the
request through Bandar. Bandar eased easily into the next administration, and teamed
up with President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to convince Congress that Saudi Arabia
should be allowed to purchase American-made electronic surveillance aircraft.
planes.
In 1982, he was appointed the military attaché at the Saudi embassy,
a move he thought would end his career. But in 1983, Bandar was named ambassador,
and he quickly became an essential middleman between the U.S. and the world, often
operating in the shadows of the diplomatic world. He was engaged in secret
negotiations to get the PLO out of Beirut during Israel's Lebanon invasion, and in
private talks with Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, Bandar
agreed to secure $32 million in Saudi front money for the Nicaraguan Contras in the
Iran-Contra scandal.
Bob Woodward alleged in his 1987 book The Veil that
Reagan's CIA director enlisted Bandar for a 1985 plot to assassinate Hezbollah
spiritual guide Sheikh Fadlullah--a bombing that went awry, missing the intended
target and killing 80 people. The Veil also recounts that at the CIA's request,
Bandar provided $2 million in Saudi funds to prevent Communists from coming to power
in Italy.
During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Bandar arranged the
U.S.-Saudi plan to supply arms to the Afghan mujahideen fighters, and then brokered
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. During the Gulf War, Bandar became
essentially a shadow member of President George H.W. Bush’s Cabinet, negotiating the
deal that sent hundreds of thousands of American troops to Saudi
Arabia.
Bandar had a closer relationship with President George H.W. Bush than
he did with any other president. He and Bush began having regular lunches soon
after Bush became Reagan’s vice-president. Bandar believed Bush was the first
important American politician he’d known who did not automatically favor Israel,
Elsa Walsh wrote in a 2003 profile of Bandar in The New Yorker. From the Start,
Bandar had found Bush helpful in advancing the Saudi cause and supportive of Saudi
efforts to buy weapons from the U.S. Bandar also liked him personally.
As a
member of Saudi Arabia’s royal elite, Bandar didn’t need cash. But as it always
seems to always be the case when involving the Bush family, oil and the Kingdom,
private profit is never far from the equation. In the three decades since the oil
embargo of 1973, the U.S. has bought hundreds of billions of dollars of oil at
reasonable prices from Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have purchased hundreds of
billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. In the process, Bandar, and other
members of the Saudi royal family, became billionaires many times over, according to
Craig Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud.
Often with Bush family
co-interests, Bandar and other Arab state royals became some of the most powerful
players in American financial markets, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in
equities and credit
Bandar and his father have invested in the Carlyle Group,
the $60 billion dollar equity firm, where George H.W. Bush was senior adviser for
nearly 10 years.
His funds were handled privately by George HW’s
brother Jonathan, and then at the soon scandal ridden Riggs Bank, when Jonathan
joined as Bank Division President.Bandar also gave a $1 million gift to the Bush
Presidential Library in Texas, that also drew support from the Sultanate of Oman,
and Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, among others.
According to a October 2001
article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, Prince Bandar, while serving as ambassador,
was involved in arms deals in London, Yemen, and the Soviet Union that generated
millions of dollars in personal "commissions.’’
Bandar also had a personal
role in the Riggs Bank scandal. The bank, once Washington’s biggest and most
illustrious, imploded in 2004 after being fined $25 million for violating
Federal money-laundering laws.. Riggs never filed``suspicious activity
reports’’ to regulators on more than two-dozen large and unusual transactions
conducted by Bandar and other officials at the Saudi and Equatorial Guinean
embassies going back to 2001. Many of these transactions involved Prince Bandar personally, with him often
transferring over $1 million at a time.
Still unanswered are many questions
about Bandar’s wife’s claim of inadvertently supporting two 911 hijackers.
Princess Haifia, made monthly payments,, through the Bush connected Riggs Bank to
the wife of a San Diego man Omar Bayoumi,who housed and fed two September 11th
hijackers and arranged their introduction to local Islamic leaders.
As the
planes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Bandar said he felt as if
the towers were falling on his own head. Though this was to be the worst political
crisis of Bandar’s career in Washington, he quickly called in all the favors
he had gained after years of helping the U.S. out of tight situations.
First,
Bandar set up a hotline at the Saudi embassy in Washington for all Saudi nationals
in the United States. For the 48 hours immediately following the attacks, he stayed
in constant contact with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, according to Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud. In
all, eight planes left the U.S., with about 140 Saudis, including 24 members of the
Bin Laden family who were scattered across the U.S. from Tampa, FL to Lexington, KY,
Unger reports.
The White House has said the flight from Tampa did not take
place: it didn’t even appear on the FAA’s log. The FBI has said ``unequivocally’’ it
played no role in facilitating any flights, Unger said. Nonetheless, payments for
the charter flights were made in advance through a wire transfer from the Saudi
embassy, Unger writes, indicating that the entire operation had high-level approval
from the U.S. government, according to Unger.
One of the men on the outbound
flights was Prince Ahmed bin Salman. As reported by Gerald Posner in his book Why
America Slept, Prince Ahmed had alleged ties to Al Qaeda, and may have even known in
advance that the attacks would occur on 9/11. In their books, both Posner and Unger
allege that Prince Ahmed was named by Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda’s chief of field
operations, as the go-between for the terrorist group and the Saudi Royal family.
Prince Ahmed’s friends and associates in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. strongly dispute
the claim.
On June 26, 2005, Prince
Bandar resigned his ambassadorship for "personal reasons." His return to Saudi
Arabia was announced just weeks prior to the death of King Fahd, after which
Bandar's father, Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, became the nation's Crown Prince. Some
speculated that Bandar's return was timed in order to secure a position in the new
government, while other observers in Washington cited Bandar’s health problems,
including a long battle with depression. In October 2005 he became the Kingdom's
national security chief.
Bandar has continued to play a prominent role in
U.S. policy, however, making visits – sometimes in secret – to the U.S. Seymour
Hersh wrote in a March 2007 article in The New Yorker that Bandar has been
instrumental in the U.S. policy of ``redirection’’ in the Middle East, with Saudi
Arabia cooperating with the Bush administration in clandestine operations against
Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Hersh cites Bandar as among the key players, though
doesn’t mention Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. [Why mention the non-mention of
Rice specifically? Aren’t there an infinite number of people ‘not mentioned’ by
Hersh?]
One of the things that makes Bandar an indispensable subcontractor on
Middle East diplomacy is his ability to talk directly to Iranian officials, Hamas or
Hezbollah. The American Secretary of State, however, is handcuffed by U.S. policy
from doing so, according to an article posted by Scott MacLeod in February 2007 on
Time magazine’s web site.
Yet by the spring of 2007, ``Bandar Bush,’’ as he
is sometimes called, found himself between a rock and a hard place. He is expected
to tow his country’s party line, which has become more independent and less
pro-American in the wake of the Iraq war, and a damaged image of the U.S. in the
Muslim world. At times, this has led Bandar to clash with the new King Abdullah, his
uncle, over policy decisions. He often finds himself at odds with the U.S., and
unable to reconcile the two sides as before.
All this has steered America’s
relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters, where Bandar may
no longer be able to serve as an infallible beacon of Saudi intent. Most bitingly,
during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh in March, the King Abdullah
condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush
administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and Bandar has since made himself
scarce.
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