03/21/04

On Sept. 13, 2001, the United States imposed a nationwide no-fly zone in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Yet more than 140 individuals were not only exempt from this rule, they were permitted to leave the country. Nearly all of them were Saudi, and roughly two dozen were kin to Osama bin Laden.

How did this happen? Were these individuals seriously questioned? Who let them leave? Given that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, why was there such a rush to squander what could be an intelligence mother lode?

Investigative journalist Craig Unger first reported this story in Vanity Fair magazine last October. In "House of Bush, House of Saud," he places the scenario in the context of a decades-old relationship between the ruling family of Saudi Arabia and America's most pre-eminent political dynasty: the Bush family.

In a year when the president will campaign tough on terror and homeland security, Unger's book proves essential reading. Not only does it pose disturbing questions about Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, witting or otherwise, but it presents a credible case that the Bush administration's relationship with the royal house of Saud precipitated this catastrophe.

Unger takes us to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when George H.W. Bush was an oil man in Texas. His early success included drilling the first off- shore well for a tiny Middle Eastern country called Kuwait. Bush abandoned oil in 1966 to move into politics and wound up head of the CIA just as Saudi businessmen close to the royal family - including the head of Saudi Arabia's most corrupt bank - began investing into Bush's home state.

The Saudis bought real estate and planes. They purchased a bank in Houston with former Texas Gov. John Connolly. They developed a skyscraper known as Texas Commerce Tower, which housed Texas Commerce Bancshares, the bank started by the grandfather of James Baker, Bush's right-hand man.

Unger reports that during the 1980s, Saudi Arabia became a convenient money and weapons launderer in the United States' attempts to stop the flow of militant extremism. The United States sent money to Nicaragua through Saudi Arabia in exchange for arms, he contends. During the Iran- Iraq war, the United States supported Saddam Hussein - whom the CIA first had hired as a 22-year-old assassin in 1959 - by giving him guns and bombs through Saudi Arabia.

What emerges from Unger's narrative is a portrait of how, on the senior Bush's watch, the United States had a way of doing business with the world's worst thugs that was duplicated and transplanted to other regions with staggering naivete.

Our allegiance with the Saudis proved so convenient that it again was used to prop up the mujahideen in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Soviet army. Saudis matched our support dollar for dollar, and a scion of the family closest to the Saudis was sent to fight and to build roads: Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia, a country built upon a schism between its fabulously wealthy royal family and the generally poor Wahhabi populace, supported bin Laden. They helped set up and fund Muslim charities, some of which in turn supported bin Laden. They funded madras schools, which taught militant extremism and then failed to provide jobs for the students when they graduated.

The United States, happy with its ability to make covert war with Saudi help and to keep oil prices down, ignored the impoverished conditions. The mujahideen, however, never turned their backs to the United States. As early as 1983, a CIA deputy was sent to Peshwar to find out if the mujahideen were selling weapons rather than using them in battle. A tribal chief responded quite frankly. "Yes," he said, "we are. We do sell your weapons. We are doing it for the day when your country decides to abandon us, just as you abandoned Vietnam and everyone else you deal with."

U.S.-Saudi ties

bring cash rewards

To hear Unger present it, Saudi Arabia was the only country the United States would not abandon. The Saudis began to repay that investment in financial ways in the 1980s. When oil prices were dropping, a Saudi investor close to the royal family bailed out a tiny Texas oil company by the name of Harken Energy, when one of its directors was George W. Bush.

Unger writes that the real payoff began when the elder Bush left office and began working for the Carlyle Group, an investment firm that used its government contacts to buy defense contractors on the cheap, secure lucrative contracts and then sell them at a high profit. In addition to Bush, the Carlyle group once had George W. Bush on its board and counted among advisers Baker and Frank Carlucci, who had served during the Reagan administration.

It goes almost without saying that Saudis also invested directly in Carlyle funds.

In a little over a dozen years, the Carlyle Group grew from a tiny firm of just four men into a multibillion-dollar company with 70,000 employees. It was the major way, Unger argues, that $1.4 billion flowed from the House of Saud to the Bush family and their interests.

So how much influence does that money buy? Unger makes a compelling case that it kept our eyes off the rising extremism in Saudi Arabia.

And yet, the Bush administration didn't steer away from Saudis, even though a Saudi was public enemy No. 1. In his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush courted the Arab-American vote by bringing up the need to stop the use of secret evidence in detaining Arab- Americans as well as racial profiling at airports.

The result was positive for Bush. Unger cites an exit poll claiming 91 percent of Florida Muslims voted for Bush. Put another way, 55,000 Arab- Americans voted for Bush in that state alone.

Bush's margin of victory, remember, was some 500 votes. As Unger puts it, "Without the mobilization of the Saudi- funded Islamic groups, George W. Bush would not be president today."

Other authors

add to picture

Unger avails himself of recent publications to fill out a story that is as disturbing as it is urgent. Drawing on "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, he argues that when Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld entered office in January 2001, they were so preoccupied with Iraq that they ignored a plan organized by counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to go after al-Qaida.

In June of that year, the American embassy announced a program to allow Saudis to obtain U.S. visas without actually appearing at the consulate in person, Unger writes. This disastrous policy allowed some of the Sept. 11 highjackers to waltz into the country.

According to Unger, the president was briefed Aug. 8 on intelligence indicating that terrorists planned an attack on U.S. soil. Soon afterward, Bush took the longest presidential vacation in 32 years - a monthlong retreat at his Crawford ranch.

So what was the administration focusing on at this time? It was repairing a Saudi-American split over some comments Bush had made criticizing Palestine. Bush immediately reversed his position, but his reward didn't even survive Sept. 11, when the world's goodwill toward America was at its highest.

Saudi officials refused to freeze bank accounts, Unger writes. They refused to allow Americans to use their soil during the invasion of Afghanistan. And Unger borrows this from Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept": Prince Ahmed bin Sultan, a member of the Saudi royal family, reportedly knew about the attacks before Sept. 11.

Ahmed was in Lexington, Ky., in the days following the attacks. On Sept. 10, he bought two racehorses for $1.2 million. Two days later, he was aboard one of the planes leaving the United States, thanks to Prince Bandar.

It seems likely that "House of Bush, House of Saud" will be labeled conspiracy theory, but Unger's research is cautious, elemental and well foot-noted.

Not surprisingly, the elder Bush and Baker declined to be interviewed by Unger. Still, what he has done here is synthesize these scattered reports into a narrative that is as chilling as it is gripping.

Freeman is a critic in New York City.