Now it was time to deliver. “We’ve got to start showing results,” Baker said behind steely eyes. “When you needed us, we came. Now we need you.” Unless Bandar’s uncle King Fahd announced that Saudi Arabia would attend some part of Baker’s three-level peace conference, Baker stood little chance of generating pressure on Syria, the Palestinians or Israel. At an Oval Office meeting, President Bush pushed Bandar hard, too. “Tell my friend the king I need his help,” Bush said.
With trepidation, Bandar returned to Jidda the next day to lay out Bush’s plea. Crown Prince Abdullah and Bandar’s own father, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, advised hanging back in classic Saudi fashion. Only late in the six-hour meeting did King Fahd seek Bandar’s view. “I can’t be sure of the consequences if we say yes,” Bandar said. “But if we say no, we will have hell to pay in American domestic polities. Our relationship with Washington will be damaged.” Fahd listened closely, then turned to his older advisers. “If you can tell me that we’ll never need the Americans again, I’ll tell them to go away,” he said. “If not, then we have to help them.” Bandar had to conceal his elation. Three days later Saudi Arabia announced that the Gulf Cooperation Council would attend the opening meeting and GCC members would take part in the regional talks to follow. It was Baker’s first big break on the road to Madrid.
The launching of peace talks is an American triumph and a personal coup for Baker. But as talks resume this month in Washington, even Baker aides admit that they might not have pulled the whole thing off without Bandar’s help. They also concede they’ll have trouble keeping it going without him. Bandar has the gift they need for translating Arab and American sensibilities to each other. “For us, dealing with the Americans is a bit like sleeping with an elephant. We’re afraid that in love and eagerness, they’ll roll over and crush us,” Bandar likes to say. “To Americans, the Arabs seem like a woman who gets in bed with you but doesn’t want to take her clothes off. Someone has to help them understand each other.”
Since arriving in Washington in 1983, Bandar has been a walking cultural contradiction. He’s partial to Cuban cigars and Chivas Scotch, and has shared both with Bush in the White House family quarters. But Bandar never smokes or drinks in front of Fahd. He trades gossip and dirty jokes with Baker, whom he calls “Jim.” But he prays five times a day during the Muslim holy season of Ramadan, and calls his uncle “My Lord.” Clad in Savile Row bespoke, he works Capitol Hill with the cockiness and directness of the former fighter pilot he is. But in Saudi Arabia, he wears flowing robes and speaks in the labyrinthine syntax of the Arab Middle East.
Bush, Baker and Fahd are all depending on the contradictions in this Saudi prince’s persona to help them over the rough spots in their new relationship. After finally admitting publicly its need for American protection in the gulf war, Saudi Arabia now seems willing to put its financial and political muscle to work for American interests in the Arab world. It’s a new partnership ripe for misunderstanding-and the Mideast peace process is its first big test.
Bandar has never been shy about wooing his friends or his enemies. From the start, he fired the embassy’s highpriced lobbyists and began working the decidedly pro-Israel U.S. Congress himself He kept U.S. arms sales flowing to Saudi Arabia. He also embraced the best of American life that Saudi oil money could buy, building a 55,000-square-foot mansion in Aspen. By the late 1980s, this Washington operator was even reaching out to American Jewish leaders to try to convince them that Saudi Arabia was no enemy to Israel.’ After one marathon session with the loquacious Bandar, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told him, “Your Highness, I’ve never known a man who could meet with three rabbis and dominate the conversation. My congratulations.”
Friends attribute Bandar’s adaptability to his upbringing, which made the young prince feel like an outsider under constant pressure to prove himself and to please. Though his father-Fahd’s full brother, Prince Sultan-is one of the most powerful princes in the kingdom, his mother was a Sudanese concubine, and Sultan barely acknowledged Bandar until the child was 7. “Westerners like to think he’s Westernized,” said a confidant. “He’s not. He’s sensitive and adaptable because he had to be to survive.”
White House and State Department officials credit Bandar with helping Bush and Fahd find common cause quickly against Iraq. It was a turning point for Saudi Arabia, which had always paid homage to “Arab solidarity.” Bandar also helped convince Syrian President Hafez Assad that it was safe to join the anti-Iraq coalition because the Americans really would “go all the way” against Saddam. He lobbied Jewish leaders and Israel’s friends on Capitol Hill to support the war. As a lure, he made promises about Saudi Arabia’s plans to advance peace with Israel once Saddam was defeated. “Bandar predicted there would be a peace conference,” says Henry Siegman, director of the American Jewish Congress, “and that Syria and Saudi Arabia would negotiate directly with Israel.”
After the war, however, an exhausted Saudi royal family retreated into isolation for Ramadan, and conservative Saudi fundamentalists began to reassert themselves. Laid up with back problems, Bandar himself went into retreat, first at Walter Reed Hospital, then at his father’s vacation compound in Switzerland. When Baker’s peace shuttle came to Jidda in late April without Bandar (the prince declined Baker’s plea to fly in from Switzerland), the secretary’s meeting with Fahd went badly. “We pressed the king to do something concrete,” says a Baker aide, “but he said he had to ‘consult’ first.” With the press hinting at a Baker disaster-in-the-making, Baker and Bush put Bandar on the spot.
After breaking the logjam with the Saudis, Bandar helped coax the Palestinians and Syrians at several crucial points on the way to Madrid. At the conference itself, Bandar leaned on the Syrians to go ahead with the second act in Baker’s script, separate face-to-face talks with Israel. Afterward he met with American Jewish leaders in New York to urge them to press Israel to be more flexible, then flew back to Saudi Arabia to work with Fahd last week on getting the Arabs to resume the bilateral talks in Washington. Baker is counting on Bandar and Fahd to maintain pressure-and incentives-to encourage the Arab players to be forthcoming in the talks ahead.
Some Saudi officials and other Arab government officials criticize Bandar as a selfpromoter. Though Bandar insists, “I don’t freelance,” he knows the dangers of pushing too hard. He saw what happened to his older brother Prince Khalid bin Sultan who commanded Saudi forces during the war. Puffed up with CNN-induced importance, Khalid continued to preen for the Western media after the war. Annoyed royal family elders quietly relieved him of his duties. “Bandar knows when it’s time to go on radio silence,” says one of his aides. But given his high profile, he, too, could see his wings clipped one day if he got too far out in front of Fahd. Meanwhile, Prince Bandar is helping transform Saudi foreign policyand maybe the future of the Middle East.
