"A desperate Disease Requires a Dangerous Remedy..."
--Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606
(A tale of 'ordinary' moral corruption among members of the Saudi royal family)
It has been only 7 years since I left the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but in a volatile region like the Middle East ("Southwest Asia", as our military prefer to term it) this is sufficient time to allow literal sea changes in Arab nations. Robert Baer's book Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold its Soul for Saudi Crude has helped filled me in on much of the political intrigue and behind the scenes activity involving the Saudi Royal Family that even those who work in the Kingdom are not normally privy to. I left Saudi Arabia at just about the time King Fahad suffered his severely debilitating CVA (stroke). Since that catalytic event, much of the previous power-structure status quo in the upper level of the ruling Al Saud has shifted dramatically. Price Adbdullah, formerly the Crown Prince and Commander of the praetorian Saudi National Guard, is acting regent, although Fahad's favorite wife (Jawhara) and her apparently demented son, Azouzi, now appear to have ('cleverly' is clearly the wrong word to use here) locked up access to King Fahad, through which (despite his severe disablement) all official matters must still be referred. That Azouzi is a dangerously manipulative and ruthless personality is clear enough, based both on what Baer states in his book and according to other sources and contacts I still maintain in the Kingdom. It has been reasonably established that he, as much as any other major player in the Royal Family, has been responsible for many of the 'funding' payoffs thrown to the Wahabi extremists (and thereby channeled to the external terrorist organisations Saudi Arabia is properly accused of funding) to keep them at bay.
Abdullah, Baer notes, is and has always been the 'odd man out' among the highest tier of ruling princes for many reasons, not the least of which is that his mother comes from a tribe formerly the sworn enemy of the Al Saud. Much has been made of Abdullah's draconian attitudes with regard to remaining aloof from the corrupt, profligate, spoiled playboy tendencies exhibited by most of the upper levels of the erstwhile 'Royal Family'. Baer goes into some incidental detail about Abdullah's preference for maintaining the simple Arab nomadic (Bedouin) lifestyle, preferring to stay in the austere desert wastes in a Bedouin tent (whenever possible) and sustaining himself on camel's milk and dates (the traditional Arab diet). It is commonly known that Abdullah is the ruling elite 'reformer' among the Al Saud royals (in this he harks back to former King Faisal, although there are marked differences between the two men) and that he would like nothing better than to revoke the protected privileges of the present Al Saud princes and princesses and thereby help save the corrupt royal family from ultimately falling from power, as victims of their own greedy excesses. For this reason (and others related to it), Abdullah is a force to be soberly regarded in the Kingdom by his brothers, who all prefer the existing status quo of unbridled royal 'rights' to wield immense power and continue acquiring (& spending) illicit wealth.
While generally true, this strong litany of noble virtue may well apply to Abdullah himself, but one wouldn't know this based on my experiences in my first contract in the Kingdom, as a 'hired hand' of Prince Sultan's Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA). I was assigned to Mustashfa Al Hada, a vast medical complex about 20 klicks north of Taif, which is the Saudi summer capitol lying at a balmy 5000 feet elevation in the Western Hijazi mountains. Perched as it was virtually on the edge of the Great Escarpment of the Assir, our hospital commanded a spectacular vantage overlooking the sere coastal wastes of the Tihama (the great coastal desert that lay between the Assir range and Jiddah, the Red Sea port), some 6000 feet below us. The escarpment in this particular locale is impressive, since the wall that Al Hada lies at the edge of falls suddenly away in a sweeping vertical shear of tectonic immensity, the huge up-thrust fault block of the Hijaz' edge reminding anyone with any sense of geology that millions of years ago some rather cataclysmic geologic events occurred here.
At any rate, At'Taif (for that is its proper name), has always been considered the balmy 'garden spot' of the Kingdom, due to its location high in the pure and rarified air of the Hijaz. For many decades, the Royal Family (and hence the Saudi Government) relocated to Taif during the superheated months of summer in Riyadh, when temperatures in Taif were a mild 22 degrees C., compared to Riyadh's severely uncomfortable 50 degrees C. As a result of this summer-time relocation, most of the most important members of the Royal Family had built costly palaces in and near Taif. In the case of Crown Prince Abdullah, his palace was located virtually a spit from our hospital complex. The Al Hada Hospital facility was originally built to provide medical care for the Royal Family while on summer retreat, although with the construction of the large King Fahad Air Base nearby (home of the F-15E equipped Royal Saudi Air Force's 5th Fighter Squadron), that mission had been extended to provide medical care and support for the RSAF personnel stationed there, as well. Of note is the fact that directly situated between Prince Abdullah's palace and our hospital was the massive Royal Saudi Air Force's Western Approach Region Air Defense radar complex; this is a fabulously expensive installation that continuously monitors the entire western (Red Sea) approaches into the Kingdom's air space, and which serves to alert the King Fahad Air Base's 5th Fighter Squadron to any hostile penetration attempts (this was, I seem to recall, a combined Lockheed/Bechtal Construction project).
In passing, it should be mentioned that the region surrounding Taif has for almost a hundred years or more been one of the prinipal theosophical strongholds of the ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic sect of the Wahabis--the same Wahabis who allied themselves originally with King Abdulaziz in the early 1900s to unify the Arabian tribes under the Al Sauds and who are now being viewed as being one of the two primary sources from which the present world-wide Islamic terrorist movement has sprung.
Since we employed the typical staff of imported female nurses from western nations (and the Philippines), most of these women were faced with the usual expat problems common to all westerners in the Kingdom: how to obtain amusement, entertainment, and attention from their colleagues of the opposite sex without attracting the attention of the conservative Islamic (Wahabi) religious police. Although all of our nurses were highly skilled and well qualified, they were subject to the same degree of constraint all non-Saudis are encumbered by. At first, in the early 80s, the nurses were left pretty much alone by the more conservative Islamic 'minders' that kept an eye on things. Male and female hospital employees were allowed to socialise together in their villas and otherwise mix together normally within the hospital residential compound. Although the swimming pool was segregated by gender, with different 'open' hours assigned to men and women, these rules were generally ignored and men and women were even able to bathe together at the large pool the hospital provided.
It wasn't long, however, before things began to change in terms of the former 'laxity' that prevailed. Gradually, the gender constraints were tightened until most of our personnel began to feel quite annoyed by the mounting harassments that the ultra-conservative religious police directed towards western employees on the hospital grounds. The casual 'romances' that normally bloomed between male & female expats began to feel the heat under such conditions, understandably. However, despite the influence increasingly exerted by the Wahabi conservatives on our gender relations, the nurses had a somewhat different alternative though within which to expiate their 'needs' for intergender socialising. These were the local 'parties' held by many of the Saudi royal princes at palaces in and near Taif.
Apparently, a good number of these 'parties', each of which was more like a small version of Soddom & Gmorrah than any 'party' you are familiar with, were given in nearby Prince Abdullah's palace. Every week, when one of these parties were being held, word would circulate among the nurses and on the announced evening, mysterious stretch limousines by the dozens would drop by the hospital and pick up all the nurses who wanted to attend. As a male employee, I never had occasion to attend any of these sordid soirees, but I certainly heard plenty of reports from nurses I worked with who had attended them. The smart ones never returned after their first introduction to these 'events', but a number of the more reckless ones apparently did and even became 'regulars'.
The standard evening would find nurses arriving at the palaces to find a large number of Saudi males (all of whom were royals or highly placed retainers of the royals) gathered around limitless liquor cabinets filled with every possible intoxicating beverage known to modern man (and then some!), and just about any drug (both addictive narcotic and hallucinogenic) might want (including but hardly limited to cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, psilocybins, qat, opium, and even some of the very early 'designer drugs' imported from South Africa). The nurses, many of them there on their first (and only) visit as a 'guest', would then be beset by an overwhelming force of hyped-up Saudi testosterone in the form of wealthy sweet-talking Rudolph Valentino clones, and invited to 'play' much in the same manner that a lamb would be invited to tea by a pack of wolves.
With understandable western naiveté, many of the western nurses would allow themselves to be coaxed into trying the ETOH and drugs, confidently thinking that they could handle themselves well enough, and also feeling that the 'royal' context of the setting would keep things above board and in hand. In most cases, and in addition to being freely plied with drugs and alcohol, many were offered very valuable solid gold (22 kt Saudi gold) bracelets, jewelry, and even large sums of money (US dollars) to go up to some of the darkly lit rooms away from the main reception area to have sex. This was well before the world-wide alarm went out about HIV and AIDS and in many cases, the sex was unprotected. What these poor nurses also didn't know was that many of these 'royal princes' they had sex with had frequently gone on prolonged holiday to the Far East, where they regularly picked up and returned with a variety of sexually transmitted diseases from the Bangkok prostitutes they frequented. Since sodomy was (and is) a favorite Arab preference, the chances that serious STDs (such as HIV) were retransmitted by anal intercourse were inordinately high. Rape is hard to stave off, under the influence of massive amounts of drugs and alcohol, of course.
A good number (from what I was told) of these nurses later suffered the consequences of these squalid bacchanalian revels after leaving the Kingdom, although many left the Kingdom with hoards of gold and substantial wealth completely unaware of what the delayed repercussions of their indulgences might be. If nurse was unwilling to comply with the Saudi sexual demands they encountered at these parties (it is common knowledge that most all Saudi men regard all western women as little more than prostitutes, anyway, due to the relative sexual freedoms they enjoy in the west), they still stood the chance of being dragged off bodily to a dark room in the palace against their wishes, and in the case of the poor Filipina nurses (many Filipinas work in the Kingdom as skilled nurses, but are given a fraction of the pay and professional regard 'western' nurses command), there were few polite preliminaries to out-and-out forced (and sometimes very brutal) rape.
The reason I mention this now is that while a good number of these orgies took place (in the mid 80s) in Crown Prince Abdullah's own palace near Al Hada, I myself doubt that the Crown Prince had anything to do with them, or even knew that other members of his immediate family were using his summer palace at Taif for such predatory goings-on. Hence, while I fully believe Baer's statements that Abdullah is still the primary Al Saud 'reformer' amongst the highest of the royal Princes, this sort of event serves as a good illustration of the sort of grossly corrupted 'above the law' debauchery that most of the royal family take as their rightful royal prerogative and a matter of course. This single example of many more incidents similar to this one is typical of the morally degenerate behavior that characterises the Saudi royal family's hyperprivilege. Exempted completely from and totally above all laws applicable to others in the Kingdom (expat and Saudi alike), it is this along with the product of their continuing graft and corrupt international business practices, that will ultimately bring ruin to the Al Saud dynasty of Saudia Arabia from the Wahabi extremists. Without the continuing protection of the United States, achieved through continuing billions in payoffs to powerful American politicians, public figures, influential US indvidualists, and corporations, the Al Saud dynasty would have been history long ago.
Speaking of Prince Abdullah, a story frequently circulated among us expats at Al Hada (perhaps it is apocryphal, but it is equally possible that it is a true story) that during the construction of Prince Abdullah's palace at Taif, some highly placed member of his family who was overseeing construction of the palace's mosque, righteously pissed off a British construction manager in charge of the project with typical Saudi arrogance. As a fitting revenge, this expat (he is rumored to have been a Scot) arranged to have a bottle of the forbidden locally brewed 'Vodka' (nicknamed 'Squeak' or 'Sidiyki') and a slab of bacon (obtained from the US Military Mission) placed in a hollow directly under the flooring of the palace's mosque in the exact spot where the Prince would perform his daily ablutions to Allah (while in residence). Since ETOH in the Kingdom is utterly forbidden and pigmeat is considered an unclean and forbidden food for any devout follower of Islam, this subtle act of revenge was monumental in terms of its potential for symbolic retribution! I still to this day wonder if it is true...or merely a wonderfully amusing story to chuckle over..........
June 2003
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