[The following article indicates the extent to which the US is beholden to’ Saudi pressure. The article correctly indicates that the Saudis were angry at the US at the end of August, 2001, yet it does not mention that one of the reasons for that anger was that Bush had ordered that the US gov’t delegation walk out of the Durban anti-racism conference in coordination with Israel]

During the first weeks of the second Bush Administration, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, met with the new President. Bandar, who is fifty-three and has been the Saudi Ambassador for twenty years, was accustomed to an unusually personal relationship with the White House; he was so close to the President’s father, George H. W. Bush, that he was considered almost a member of the family. The Saudi Ambassador had been happy about the younger Bush’s victory, but he was worn out by the unpublicized role he had played in the failed negotiations to resolve the Middle East crisis during the last weeks of the Clinton Presidency.

President Clinton had been working on a compromise for years; after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he had called this effort part of his “personal journey of atonement.” Bush had been briefed on the collapse of the talks and was baffled by Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. “Explain one thing to me,” he said to Bandar. “I cannot believe somebody will not strike a deal with two desperate people.”

When Bandar asked what Bush meant by “desperate,” Bush explained: President Clinton had been eager to leave office with a settlement in the Middle East, and Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, needed a deal to survive the next election. Bush said that he didn’t think 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. Yet to say so publicly would damage the Palestinian cause, which had been championed by the Saudis, who would then lose any leverage they still had. Bush told Bandar 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 had received confidential assurances from Colin Powell, the Secretary of State-designate, that he was to relay to Arafat: the Middle East deal made by Clinton that the new Administration endorsed would be enforced. Powell warned that the “peace process” would be different under Bush. Bush would not spend hours on the telephone, and Camp David was not going to become a motel. The message was clear, and until the end Bandar had continued to hope: it appeared that Arafat would get almost everything he wanted, and that Bush’s Administration, which Bandar saw as more tough-minded than Clinton’s, would stand behind the agreement.

“I still have not recovered, to be honest with you, inside, from the magnitude of the missed opportunity that January,” Bandar told me at his home in McLean, Virginia. “Sixteen hundred Palestinians dead so far. And seven hundred Israelis dead. In my judgment, not one life of those Israelis and Palestinians dead is justified.”

We met in late November, during Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and Bandar had invited me to break the day’s fast with him. Steel barriers block the way to the house, which overlooks the Potomac River, and I had passed through a security checkpoint, where commandos in khaki pants and vests inspected my car for explosives. Bandar has a full, expressive face and a boisterous laugh. He usually wears European clothes when meeting Westerners, but on that evening he wore the traditional Saudi dress-a white caftan and sandals. He was eagerly relighting a slim cigar (smoking, too, is banned during fasting hours). On the table were nearly two dozen dishes of rice, stews, beans, and breads. We were in a dining room with a hand-painted mural of Washington, D.C., as a backdrop. Bandar pointed to the small jet rounding the Monument, an image commissioned by his wife, Princess Haifa, in a nod to Bandar’s years as a fighter pilot for the Royal Saudi Air Force.

That week had not been a good one, but neither had any week for more than a year-not since September 11, 2001, when nineteen hijackers, Islamic fundamentalists, attacked the United States, and fifteen of them were identified as Saudi nationals. There were a great many news stories reporting that hundreds of millions of dollars have gone from Saudi companies and charities to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda. Late last year, it turned out that Princess Haifa had made a charitable donation that ended up in the bank account of the wife of a man who helped two of the hijackers. F.B.I. and Justice Department officials later said that the financial trail was indirect: a check from the Princess, intended for a Jordanian woman married to a Saudi who needed an operation, had been endorsed to someone else. But the reaction in the press and from some politicians was harsh: What side were the Saudis on? “I felt like the whole world fell on my head,” Haifa told me, in January, sitting in her living room. She is a tall woman with shoulder-length hair that is streaked with gray. “How can I want to help these people when they want our downfall?” she asked. Laura Bush called to sympathize; so did George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. “I felt horribly about the attacks on her,” the elder Bush wrote to me.

The Saudi connection to September 11th was not Bandar’s first crisis, but it has certainly been his worst. In the Reagan era, he was exposed as an intermediary in the Iran-Contra affair; it was Bandar who arranged for thirty-two million dollars in Saudi financing for the Nicaraguan Contras. The Saudi Ambassador operated at times in the shadows of diplomacy. But now Bandar was working to save the reputation of his own country, a nation where Wahhabism, an extreme and rigidly austere version of Islam, was routinely taught and practiced. (The Wahhabis believe in a literal interpretation of the Koran and in their duty to convert or rid their nation of non-Wahhabi Muslims.) Americans seemed to be looking at his country with fresh eyes, and they saw a place with anti-democratic institutions, with a royal family that ruled with oil money, and with a population that was virulently anti-American. On the night he heard that fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis, Bandar said, “I was shocked. I was depressed. I was angry. Then it dawned on me that every fight I had in this town-political fight-I had it with Congress, with the Administration, but I always felt very comfortable as far as public opinion is concerned. This time, I thought, I have no problems with the Administration or Congress or even with the media, in a sense. But Joe Six-Pack is not going to understand now the fine differences.”

Bandar, the senior diplomat in Washington, has served under four American Presidents, and has been the emissary to, among others, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Saddam Hussein, and the Chinese government. He is a man of exuberant charm; he is also flashy, cunning, secretive, and, at times, ruthless (“a.k.a. ‘Mr. Smoothie’ ” is how the Times columnist William Safire has referred to him). Unlike most ambassadors, Bandar has unprecedented access to the President and to most senior American officials. On the night that we met in McLean, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., stopped by for a quick meeting, and when I visited Bandar last month he received a telephone call from Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser. Rice was checking on Saudi efforts to persuade the French to support a second U.N. resolution calling on Iraq to disarm. Some think that Bandar exaggerates his influence and his presence, but his name shows up repeatedly in any recounting of the political events of the past twenty years-in particular as a fixer of problems that cannot be solved in the open. According to an authoritative Israeli source, Ehud Barak thought that in many cases Bandar’s intercession was more effective than that of the American peacekeeping team. “At the end of the day, who can deliver is who wins the battle,” Bandar told me.

Bandar lives in two worlds, and the ease with which he moves between them has made him a natural intermediary. He is a member of the Saudi royal family-the son of the Defense Minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who is second in line to the Crown. He is widely regarded as pragmatic and non-ideological, and sensitive to the subtleties of complex and emotional issues. He is fond of American colloquialisms and American history, and he likes Big Macs served on silver platters. “I am more Alexander Hamilton ideals than Jeffersonian Democrat,” he likes to say, referring to his conservative political leanings. He travels frequently on his private Airbus A-340; since December, he has travelled six times between Washington and Saudi Arabia, with stops in Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Paris, and London, carrying messages between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah, the de-facto Saudi ruler, and other heads of state. When I saw him last week, he had just returned from Riyadh; the first people he saw were Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

He has the ability to focus intimately on the person in front of him, laughing and trading gossip, and he speaks animatedly, his eyes and hands in constant motion. He has always known how to make friends with important people and with people who will someday be important. Nancy Reagan used him to relay messages to her husband’s Cabinet; he played racquetball with Colin Powell in the seventies. (Powell lives nearby in McLean, and the two see each other frequently.) One of our interviews lasted for seven hours, until nearly midnight; afterward, Bandar went to the airport to leave for Saudi Arabia. I had not known that he was going until he stood up and put on a lambskin-lined full-length desert coat and joined the waiting motorcade. “A long time ago, when I was young and immature and aggressive, a Jewish car salesman in Alabama told me, ‘Make your words soft an

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