Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey Read Free Book Online Page A

forceful. Known as Abu Sharrain, “the Father of Twin Evils,” the elderly prince had a vile temper that would be revealed to the outside world in 1977 when he ordered the deaths of his granddaughter and her lover, who had tried to elope. This tragic scandal was later depicted in the British TV film Death of a Princess, 4 and might have caused the Al-Saud even more embarrassment had Mohammed not agreed to step aside from the succession in the 1960s. Sidelined from public office, paid off with land grants and endless deference, his prickly pride was salved by the knowledge that the prince who replaced him was his full blood brother.
    Khaled’s mild and conciliatory style made him an altogether better guardian of the clan’s equilibrium. He was generally assumed to be a cypher whose function was to rubber-stamp the executive decisions of his westernized younger half brother Fahd, the crown prince. But Khaled had bedouin shrewdness and two very relevant strengths—his links with the tribes, who embraced him as they never embraced Fahd, and his similarly warm relationship with the council of the ulema (“those who possess learning”—the religious sheikhs). These traditional connections were exactly what the crisis of the Grand Mosque called for, and on the first day of the new century Fahd happened, in any case, to be far from Riyadh—the crown prince was representing the Kingdom at an Arab League summit in Tunis.
    “We were awoken by phone calls very early that morning,” remembers Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the young director of Saudi foreign intelligence who was also attending the conference. “The crown prince told me to go back at once. There were important issues in Tunis, so he was going to stay at the summit.”
    The soft-spoken Turki was one of the rising stars of the family. Educated at the Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey, Georgetown, Princ eton, and Cambridge, he had the gravitas of his father, Faisal, and the insouciance to spend four months in his twenties driving a new Lamborghini home from London to Arabia. When he got back to Mecca on the night of Tuesday, November 20, 1979, he rapidly discovered the nature of the foe the Al-Saud was up against. As he reached out for the handle of the door at the Shoubra Hotel, where his uncles had set up their headquarters, a bullet shattered the glass in front of him. Juhayman had stationed snipers in the soaring minarets of the Grand Mosque, and they had already claimed victims.

    The task of recapturing the Mosque had been assigned to Fahd’s full brothers, Sultan, the defense minister, and Nayef, the interior minister, assisted by Nayef ’s deputy and younger brother, Ahmad. With Salman, the governor of Riyadh, they made up the core of the so-called Sudayri Seven, Abdul Aziz’s seven sons by his cleverest wife, Hissa Al-Sudayri. 5 The Sudayris were the powerhouse at the heart of the Al-Saud, owing their influence partly to their numbers (no other grouping of blood brothers numbered more than three), but mainly to their mutual loyalty, ambition, and extraordinary appetite for work—qualities instilled in them by their mother. To her dying day, the formidable Hissa insisted that all seven of her boys, no matter how grand they had become, should gather in her home once a week for lunch.
    Sultan and Nayef had reached Mecca by nine that morning and started deploying their forces—some local army regiments and a couple of companies of the Special Security Force, a unit of Nayef ’s Interior Ministry. The Mecca regiments of the National Guard also moved into the town. Their commander, Abdullah, would shortly fly back from a holiday in Morocco.
    A respectable military grouping had been put in place within hours. But its princely commanders had no authority to assault the Grand Mosque—that permission would have to come from the grand council of the ulema, who were being hastily assembled in Riyadh. Nor at this stage did the princes know much about who or what