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THE WAR AT HOME

FAMILY FRIENDSPresident Bush and Saudi

ambassador Prince Bandar binSultanat Bush's ranch in Crawford,

Texas, August 27, 2002. Inset, heburning towers on 9/11.

S A V I N G T H E S A U D I SJust days after 9/11, wealthy Saudi Arabians,including members of the bin Laden family, were whisked

out of the U.S.on private jets. No one wil ladmit to clearing the flights, and the passengers weren'tquestioned. Did the Bush family's longrelationship with th e Saudis help make it happen?

B Y C R A IG U N G E Rn the morning of Septem-her 13, 2001, a 49-year-oldprivate eye named DanGrossi got an unexpectedcall f rom th e Tampa PoliceDepartment. Grossi hadworked with the Tampaforce for 20 years before re -t i r ing, and i t was not particularly unusual

fo r th e police to recommend f o r m e r offi-ce rs for special security jobs. B ut Grossi'sne w assignment w as very much ou t of th eordinary.Tw o days earlier, terrorists had hijacked

f o u r airliners and carried out the worstatrocity in American history. Fifteen of the19 hijackers had been f rom Saudi Arabia."The police had been giving Saudi students

162 I V A N I T Y F A I R

protection since September 11,"Grossi re-calls. "They asked if I was interested in es-corting these students f r om Tampa to Lex-ington, Kentucky."Grossi was told to go to the airport,where a small charter je t would b e avail-

able to take him and the Saudis on theirflight. H e w a s dubious about th e prospectso f accomplishing h is task. "Quite f rankly,I knew that everything was grounded,"hesays. "I never thought this w as going to hap-pen." Even so, Grossi, who'd been asked tobring a colleague, phoned M a n u e l Perez,a former F.B.I, agent, to put him on alert.Perez was equally unconvinced. "I said,'Forget about it,'" Perez recalls. '"Nobodyis flying today.'"

The two men had good reason to be

skeptical . Within minutes of the attackson9/11, the Federal Aviation Administrationhad sent ou t a special notification called aN O T A M a notice to airmen ordering everyairborne plane in the United States to landat the nearest airport as soon as possible,an d prohibiting planes on the ground fromtaking off. For the next tw o days, commer-c ia l and private aviation throughout th eentire United States ceased. Former vicepres ident A l Gore w as stranded in Austriawh en his flight to the U.S. w as canceled. BillClinton postponed travel as well. Major-league baseball games were called off. Fo rthe first time in a century, American skieswere nearly as empty as they ha d been when

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1 of 4 DOCUMENTSCopyright 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

The New YorkerMarch 24, 2003

SECTION: FACT; Content; Pg. 48LENGTH: 12287 wordsHEADLINE: THE PRINCE;How the Saudi Am bassador became Washington's indispensable_operator. ~BYLINE: ELSA WALSHBODY:

During the first weeks of the second Bush Administration, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States,Prince Bandar bin S ultan, met with the new President. Ban dar, who is fifty-three and has been the Saudi Ambassadorfor twenty years, was accustomed to an un usually personal relationship with the Wh ite House; he was so close to thePresident's father, George H. W. Bush, that he was considered almost a member of the family. The Saudi Ambassadorhad been happy about the younger Bush's victory, but he was worn out by the unpublicized role he had played in thefailed negotiations to resolve the Middle East crisis during the last weeks of the Clinton Presidency.President Clinton had been work ing on a comprom ise for years; after the M onica L ewinsky scandal, he had calledthis effort part of his "personal journey of atonement." Bush ha d been briefed on the collapse of the talks and was

baffled by Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Au thority. "Explain one thin g to me," he said to Bandar. "I cannotbelieve somebody will not strike a deal with two desperate people."When Bandar asked what Bush meant by "desperate," Bush explained: President C linton had been eager to leaveoffice with a settlement in the Middle East, an d Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, needed a deal to survive the nextelection. Bu sh said that he didn't thin k Arafat really wanted to solve the problem.Bandar believed that Arafat's failure to accept the deal in January of 2001 was a tragic mistake-a crime, really. Yetto say so publicly would damage the Palestinian cause, which ha d been championed by the Saudis, who would then losean y leverage they still had. Bush told B andar that, unlike Clinton, he did not intend to intervene aggressively.Bandar left the meeting even more distressed. At the end of the Clinton Presidency, Bandar ha d receivedconfidential assurances from Colin Powell, the Secretary of State-designate, that he was to relay to Arafat: the MiddleEast deal made by Clin ton that the new Adm inistration endorsed would be enforced. Pow ell warned that the "peaceprocess" wou ld be different under Bush. Bush would not spend hours on the telephone, and Camp David was not goingto become a motel. The message was clear, an d until the end Bandar had continued to hope: it appeared that Arafatwould get almost everything he wanted, an d that Bush's Adm inistration, which Bandar saw as more tough-minded thanClinton's, wo uld stand behind the agreement."I still have not recovered, to be honest with you, inside, from the ma gnitu de of the missed op portunity thatJanuary," Bandar told me at his home in McLean, Virginia . "Sixteen hu ndred Palestinians dead so far. A nd sevenhundred Israelis dead. In my judgment , not one life of those Israelis and Palestin ians dead is just if ied."We met in la te N ovember , during Ramadan , when Musl ims fast from dawn to dusk , an d Bandar ha d invited me tobreak the day's fast with him. Steel barriers block the way to the house, which overlooks the Potomac River , and I hadpassed through a secur ity checkpoint , where comm andos in khaki pants an d vests inspected my car for explosives.

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3 of 4 DOCUMENTSCopyright 2001 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

The New YorkerNovember 12, 2001

SECTION: THE POLITICAL SCENE; Pg. 54LENGTH: 4794 wordsHEADLINE: THE HOUSE OF BIN LADEN;A family's, and a nation's, divided loyalties.BYLINE: JANE MAYERBODY:On September 11th, Wafah Binladin, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, was finishing thesummer holidays with her family in Geneva. W afah's father, Yeslam, is the Geneva-based head of the Binladin family'sEuropean holding company , the Saudi Investment Company. W hen she learned of the terror attacks on America, Wafah,wh o lived in a rented loft in SoHo, became frantic. She knew several people who lived and worked in the area of theWorld Trade Center, and she repeatedly tried to reach friends in New York. "I was in shock," she recalled, when Ireached her in Switzerland recently. "All I thought about was the people in those bu ildings. I couldn't get hold of myf r i e n d s . . . . I live only ten blocks away. Every night, I'd walk home, down West Broadway, looking up at the TwinTowers. I have pictures of myself there with my friends. W e went to Windows on the World. I kept thinking, How cananyone do such a thing?" Later, sh e says, sh e heard the news that the prime suspect was her uncle Osama bin Laden.(Some members of the family prefer "Binladin.") "I thought then, Oh, no ! Ill never be able to go back to the Statesagain."

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, meanwhile, another uncle, Abdullah bin Laden, a handsome, slightly built graduateof Harvard Law S chool, learned about the attack while ordering coffee at Starbucks. Ab dullah, who is thirty- five and ahalf brother of Osama bin Laden, rushed back to his apartment to watch the news , arriving just in time to see the secondplane crash, into the south tower of the World Trade Center.By mid-October, A bdullah, who w as o rdinarily clean-shaven, started to let his beard grow . People who knew himwell realized that he was preparing to shed his We stern way s. (He lived in an apartment overlooking the Charles R iver,spent leisure time piloting private planes at nearby Hansco m Airfield, and dreamed of working at a Ma nhattan lawfirm.) Instead, he said not long ago, o ver lunch at an Afgha ni restaurant in Boston, he was returning ho me to SaudiArabia. His mission w as to persuade other mem bers of his family-fifty siblings among them-that they had to publiclyput more distance between themselves and Osama or risk losing their reputation as honorable businessmen. The binLaden family owns and runs a five-billion-dollar-a-year global corporation that includes the largest construction firm inthe Islamic world , with offices in London and Geneva.Abdullah is still conferring w ith many of his siblings at family compounds in Riyadh and Jidda. He has yet to getthe family to agree upon a joint public statement. The reason, according to some people who have been in touch withthe bin Ladens, is that the family, despite its pro-American reputation, holds loyalties that are more complicated thaneither Abdullah or the family's many influential American friends, defenders, an d business partners m ight have known.(The family keeps tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars invested in American companies and financialinstitutions.) "There's o bviously a lot of spin by the Saudi B inladin Group"-the family's corporate name-"to distinguishitself from Osama," Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism chief, told me. "I've been follow ing the binLadens for years, and it's easy to say, We disown him.' Many in the family have. B ut blood is usually thicker thanwater."