Kings and Presidens

Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR

Bruce Riedel

• Editorial: Brookings Institution Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780815737162
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica mediorientale

An insider's account of the often-fraught U.S.-Saudi relationship

Saudi Arabia and the United States have been partners since 1943, when President Roosevelt met with two future Saudi monarchs. Subsequent U.S. presidents have had direct relationships with those kings and their successors—setting the tone for a special partnership between an absolute monarchy with a unique Islamic identity and the world's most powerful democracy.

Although based in large part on economic interests, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has rarely been smooth. Differences over Israel have caused friction since the early days, and ambiguities about Saudi involvement—or lack of it—in the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States continue to haunt the relationship. Now, both countries have new, still-to be-tested leaders in President Trump and King Salman.

Bruce Riedel for decades has followed these kings and presidents during his career at the CIA, the White House, and Brookings. This book offers an insider's account of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, with unique insights. Using declassified documents, memoirs by both Saudis and Americans, and eyewitness accounts, this book takes the reader inside the royal palaces, the holy cities, and the White House to gain an understanding of this complex partnership.

Chapter One

FDR AND IBN SAUD, 1744 TO 1953

It was an extraordinary meeting during an extraordinary trip. On January 22, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the White House secretly by train for Newport News, Virginia, where he boarded an American naval cruiser, the USS Quincy. Ten days later, on February 2, the Quincy docked in Malta, where the president transferred to the first presidential aircraft, the Sacred Cow, to fly to Yalta in the Crimea for a top-secret conference with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill. FDR hoped this meeting would build a new world order to prevent another global catastrophe like the Second World War. The Yalta summit finished on February 11 and FDR flew to Cairo for one more vital meeting.¹

On February 14, 1945, as the Second World War was coming to an end, President Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman al Saud in Egypt, and the two forged a partnership that has endured, despite occasional severe strains, for the last seventy years. Even today, every Saudi official recalls the meeting vividly. Photos of the two leaders together are ubiquitous in Saudi embassies, and the American ambassador’s residence in Riyadh is named after the cruiser on which the two held their summit.

Franklin Roosevelt and Ibn Saud meeting aboard the USS Quincy, February 14, 1945. (FDR Presidential Library)

The American-Saudi summit meeting was a closely held secret for security reasons; only a handful on each side knew it was coming. Germany was in the final agony of defeat, but it still had sharp claws, U-boats and jet fighters that could surprise an unwary opponent. FDR and Ibn Saud, as the king was known in the world by 1945, met on the USS Quincy, the cruiser that brought FDR across the Atlantic and then back again to America, in the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal.

Roosevelt’s health was very poor and he had only a few weeks to live. The trip was grueling and dangerous; FDR would travel 13,842 miles through a chaotic war zone. Churchill would later write that FDR “had a slender contact with life.” His blood pressure was 260 over 150.² The USS Quincy was surrounded by other cruisers and destroyers with an air cap overhead of fighter planes. German U-boat submarines were a constant menace. The president stayed in constant contact with the White House map room by cable, and through the map room’s cables he was kept up-to-date on the progress of the war.

Ibn Saud had come from Jidda on an American destroyer, the USS Murphy, with an entourage of bodyguards, cooks, and slaves, plus an astrologer, a fortuneteller, and other retainers—and some sheep. The Murphy was the first-ever American Navy vessel to visit Jidda. The Navy’s only available charts dated from 1834. The king only reluctantly agreed to leave his wives behind in Jidda when he was told their privacy could not be assured in the crowded space of a destroyer. His brother Saud accompanied him as well as his son, Crown Prince Saud, and his interpreter. A senior member of the ulema, or clergy, was also in the king’s party. Another son, Prince Faisal, stayed behind in Jidda to run affairs and communicated with the king’s party every hour by radio to assure Ibn Saud that all was well in the Kingdom. It was the king’s first trip outside the Arabian Peninsula aside from a brief visit to Basra in Iraq and his first time to travel at sea.

The two leaders were remarkably different. FDR was the scion of one of America’s most famous families. He had grown up in the most modern country in the world and the oldest democracy. After a failed run at vice president in 1920 and a paralyzing polio attack in 1921 he had gone on to win four elections for the presidency. He had led America out of the Great Depression and then through the fire of World War II. He had traveled the world and was, in 1945, undoubtedly the most powerful man in the world.

Ibn Saud had been born in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, one of the most backward and impoverished lands in the world. He, too, was a scion of a famous family, but it had fallen on hard times and was living in exile in Kuwait. Ibn Saud had restored his family’s rule in the Arabian Peninsula, fought numerous battles, and had gone on to expand the borders of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to dominate the peninsula. He had a prodigious sex life, producing forty-three acknowledged sons and at least fifty-five daughters. He told a confidant, the Englishman Harry St. John Philby, that he had “married no fewer than 135 virgins.”³ His kingdom was an absolute monarchy, desperately poor but sitting on incredible riches in oil. FDR was the first foreign head of state Ibn Saud had ever met. In 1945 there were only 400 foreigners in all of Saudi Arabia, about one hundred of whom were Americans in the oil fields near Dhahran.⁴

FDR came to the Great Bitter Lake to see Ibn Saud as part of the mission that had taken him to Yalta, fashioning the postwar world. At Yalta he had focused on creating the United Nations to provide the framework for the new political order that would come after the worst war in human history. In the Suez Canal he was seeking to ensure Saudi support for that order through a bargain that would trade American security guarantees for access to Saudi oil, and Saudi political support for stability in the Middle East.

Oil was very much on Roosevelt’s mind. The huge armies, air forces, and navies of the Second World War were fueled by oil—no longer by coal and horsepower, as their predecessors had been. At the peak of military operations in 1944 in Europe, for example, the daily requirement of oil for the U.S. Army and Air Force in just that theater of the global conflict was fourteen times the total amount of gasoline shipped to Europe in the First World War. By 1945, some 7 billion barrels of petroleum had been required to support the allied war effort. American domestic production provided two-thirds of the global output and American refineries almost the entire refined product. Already American experts believed Saudi Arabia would prove to be the home of vast quantities of as yet unproven oil reserves. The Kingdom mattered enormously for postwar energy.⁵

Oil was also on the king’s mind. He and his country were broke. The depression and the war had hurt Saudi Arabia badly. The British had been subsidizing the Saudis for years, but they, too, were broke. Only the United States had the resources to help the Saudi economy cope until oil production grew sufficiently to make the Kingdom solvent. Americans had found oil in Saudi Arabia and were exploring for more.

The king was also worried about the Kingdom’s security as well as its economy. The Middle East was a rough neighborhood then and remains so now, and the king was well aware of his many enemies. The Hashemites, who ruled Jordan and Iraq and claimed their lineage had a direct family connection to the Prophet Muhammad, longed to recover the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina that Ibn Saud had seized from them two decades earlier. Yemen was a constant source of tension; Ibn Saud had taken territory from its rulers, as well. Even his putative ally Great Britain was an avaricious empire that might yet want Saudi oil. The Kingdom was vulnerable and needed an ally.

Roosevelt and Ibn Saud agreed to work together to ensure stability in the postwar Middle East. The United States would ensure security for the Kingdom, and the Saudis would ensure access to their oil fields. The United States acquired use of Dhahran air base for operations in the Middle East; U.S. oil companies were already operating in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia declared war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan two weeks later, thus securing a seat in the United Nations.

The Quincy summit was carefully planned in advance. Ibn Saud’s son Prince Faisal, the future king, had visited the United States in November 1943 to begin the courtship. Faisal flew from the Kingdom through Africa to arrive in Miami before heading to Washington. Prince Faisal and his brother Prince Khalid, another future king, stayed at Blair House while meeting with President Roosevelt and senior executive and legislative officials. Faisal was only thirty-seven, but he had been serving as his father’s top diplomat since 1919, when he was twelve and had traveled to London to discuss the future of the region after the First World War. After visiting Washington, Faisal and Khalid traveled to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland before flying to London. It was during Faisal’s visit that the plans for the Dhahran air base were agreed upon and the United States began providing military assistance to the Kingdom.⁶ By the end of the war American lend-lease assistance to the Kingdom amounted to almost $100 million.⁷ An American chargé d’affaires arrived in the Kingdom in 1943, the first American diplomat accredited to Saudi Arabia.⁸

Aboard the USS Murphy the king and his entourage slept and ate on the deck. They slaughtered a lamb they had brought with them and prayed five times a day, relying on the destroyer captain to tell them the direction to Mecca. Ibn Saud was introduced to apple pie à la mode and loved it. The king saw his first movie, The First Lady, a documentary about the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown fighting in the Pacific against the Japanese Imperial Navy. The one-hour Technicolor film had exciting scenes of aerial dogfights and crashes on the flight deck. Another American movie was shown to the king’s entourage later, Best Foot Forward, a Lucille Ball musical comedy that featured a scene where her dress was ripped off. Ibn Saud’s sons decided it was not fitting for their father.

Also on board the USS Murphy was America’s consul to Saudi Arabia, Colonel William Eddy, a Marine hero of World War I. Eddy was born in Lebanon and spoke fluent Arabic. After his service in the First World War he taught at Dartmouth College and the American University of Cairo, then went on to be a college president. At the start of World War II he returned to active duty in the Marines and was assigned as naval attaché, first in Cairo and then in Tangier. After the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, Eddy was assigned to the OSS. He played a central role in collecting intelligence in French North Africa before the Allied invasion in 1942, but his proposals to arm the Arab population against the French Vichy colonial government were regarded as too dangerous by the Allied military command, which did not want to encourage Arab nationalism.⁹ He acquired a reputation for espionage daring and expertise in Arabia. In 1943 Eddy was assigned to Saudi Arabia and in November 1944 he was promoted to the position of American chargé to the kingdom. After the war Eddy would play a part in the early development of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Eddy’s account of the summit on the Quincy is the principle firsthand source of what happened there. On board the Murphy and the Quincy Eddy had the difficult duty of reconciling two strong traditions, those of the U.S. Navy and the House of Saud. He did so brilliantly.

On February 14 the two ships came together and Ibn Saud transferred to the USS Quincy. FDR sent his daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, who was traveling with him, to Cairo for the day to shop, telling her that “this king is a Muslim, a true believer with lots of wives. As a Muslim he will not permit women in his presence when he is talking to other men.”¹⁰ No guns were fired to salute the king, to maintain the secrecy about the meeting, and the two men began an informal discussion on the deck.

The king raised one issue at the start. He had received a message that British prime minister Winston Churchill wanted to see him in Egypt. Churchill had learned from FDR on the final day of the Yalta summit of FDR’s upcoming visit to see Ibn Saud. Churchill was determined that the Middle East remain the sole preserve of the British Empire when the war ended, and he was not going to let FDR get a jump on London. The Saudis had had a difficult relationship with the British for decades, largely because the British backed their Arab rivals, the Hashemites, and sought domination of the Arabian Peninsula. Ibn Saud wanted FDR’s advice: Should he meet with Churchill? The president, who increasingly regarded Churchill as a Victorian imperialist antique wedded to keeping the empire intact, told the king to see Churchill. He was, undoubtedly, confident that Churchill would misplay his meeting with the Saudis and only reinforce Ibn Saud’s inclination to tilt to Washington.

Ibn Saud told the president that the two of them shared much in common, including infirmity. The king could walk only with difficulty, due to his age and many war wounds. FDR was paralyzed from the waist down. FDR gave Ibn Saud one of his extra wheelchairs on the spot to assist the king. It was to become a prized possession even though the king was too large to fit comfortably in the chair.

Lunch was served in the captain’s mess below decks. On the way down in the elevator, FDR stopped the lift and smoked two cigarettes, having refrained from smoking in the king’s presence. Lunch was prepared by the president’s Filipino chefs from the White House. On the menu were curried lamb, rice, grapefruit, eggs, raisins, tomatoes, olives, pickles, chutney, and coconut. The king was so pleased that he asked if he could be given the chef as a gift. In the Kingdom, royal chefs were slaves. FDR cleverly told the king the chef had a contract with the U.S. Navy and could not break it.

After lunch the two went back on deck for a four-hour meeting with only Eddy present as the translator. Now that the two had established a personal connection and agreed that America and Saudi Arabia should be allies in the postwar world, Roosevelt wanted to raise another issue: the fate of Europe’s Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In Yalta the president had told Stalin he was going to see Ibn Saud and raise the question of a Jewish homeland for the survivors of the German concentration camps. Stalin said the Soviets had tried to create a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan in Siberia. Stalin had created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan in 1934 as a bid to increase support for the ...