The King Comes West

(See Cover)

In the warm sunshine, as a swarm of Russian-built MIGs circled overhead, an American-piloted Convair dropped down on Cairo's airport. Erupting from its interior came six fierce-looking bodyguards, their gold daggers glinting beside shiny machine pistols thrust in their black bandoleers. Twenty-one guns boomed ceremonially as a tall, majestically robed Arab King stepped down from the plane, silver-rimmed spectacles gleaming beneath his flowing, gold-banded headdress. Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab in a business suit, stepped forward, and kissed him on both cheeks.

His Majesty King Saud ibn Abdul Aziz al Faisal Al Saud, with a 65-man entourage, was on his royal way to Washington for a state visit with President Dwight Eisenhower.

Saudi Arabia's Saud, only six months ago depreciated in most quarters as a well-meaning but confused desert chieftain, has become a much-sought-after man in the Arab world, and a key figure in U.S. hopes for a more stable Middle East.

The Partners. This slow, bespectacled chief of the world's most feudalistic autocracy is a curious associate for the West's greatest democracy. Saud is responsible to no parliament or council, and no Saudi is allowed a vote. The King's air-conditioned palaces rise in a land where one in every three citizens is still a nomad living in black tents and using camel urine for hair dressing, and only five out of 100 have enough education even to write their own names.

But in the swirling passions that have swept the Middle East since Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal Company, Saud has become pivotal just by holding fast to reality. That reality confronts him every time he drives past the flaming gas flares outside Dhahran, where the U.S.-owned Arabian American Oil Co. wells tap fields that are estimated to contain three times as much oil as the whole U.S. Profits from these fields bring Saud a yearly income of $300 million, finance his government, build his palaces and swimming pools, buy him Cadillacs and Convairs. But Saud knows that without U.S. skills and capital, there are not enough technicians and engineers in the whole Moslem world to get Saudi Arabia's oil out of the ground.

Other Arabs have known as much, and let unreasoning hatred of the "exploiters' sweep all reason before them. That Saud has not is a tribute to his own character and to the evolution of a businesslike arrangement as an alternative to colonialism's notorious evils. For the partnership between king and company has been based from the first on strict terms of U.S. noninterference in Saudi Arabia's domestic policies. The royalties Aramco pays provide 90% of the government's revenues. Without Aramco, Saudi Arabia would revert to a black-tent kingdom of camels, date palms and holy places. But no U.S. adviser has his office in the palace compound (as the British ambassador did in Jordan), no company agent issues authoritative suggestions to Saud's government officials (as Anglo-Iranian did in Iran). The result has been that nowhere else in the world, where such a single foreign interest so dominates a nation's economy, is there less rancor between government and company, between host and paying guest.

The U.S. Government's scrupulous hands-off attitude does not imply a lack of concern. At Dhahran, the U.S. has built and maintained a major airfield, whose 10,000-ft. runways could land long-range bombers in case of war. Around the shores of the Persian Gulf lie three-quarters of the world's oil reserves, one-sixth of those reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.

Oil and geography have thrust Arabia back onto the stage of history from which it had vanished for over a thousand years. Then the Sons of the Prophet swarmed out of the desert to destroy the infidel and conquer an empire for Allah --an empire bigger than Rome's, which vanished and left as relics the tongue of Arabic and the faith of Islam that five times daily calls 300 million Moslems to bow down toward Mecca in concentric windrows that stretch from Morocco on the West to Indonesia on the East. After the Arab tide receded, Arabia drowsed for centuries in its black tents, unnoticed and unnoticing as history passed it by--the bleak and secret land of Islam's holy places forbidden to all but the faithful. In all Arabia there was not a single factory, a hard-topped road, a telephone.

Then, in 1938, Aramco (invited in by Saud's father because "Americans get oil out of the ground, and they -stay out of politics") tapped the black gold beneath the deserts. Delayed by the war, production began in quantity in 1945. Overnight refineries spraddled the shore of the Persian Gulf, pipelines crawled past ancient caravan trails to the Mediterranean. As money poured in on the kingdom whose national treasury used to be carried in a camel's saddlebags, princes born to the saddle splashed in shaded swimming pools and traders of pearls and spices became sellers of Chevrolets.

The Wahabis. Neither training nor heritage has equipped 55-year-old King Saud for the test history has set him--"to bring Arabia's medieval society into workable relationship to the 20th century, which is flooding in on it. His father Ibn Saud was a desert warrior, whose domains were oases deep in Arabia's barren heartland. The Saudis were fanatic disciples of Mohammed Wahab, Islam's 18th century Martin Luther, who cried that Islam had fallen on evil ways. Ibn Saud became the scourging sword of Wahabism, a zealot whose savagery in the name of Allah struck terror throughout the length and breadth of Arabia's inner desert. The aristocratic Hashemites, who ruled in the holy land of the west coast and sent their sons to Harrow for education and Paris for experience, laughed at the Saudis as narrow and ignorant yokels. Faced with a choice in World War I, the British backed the Hashemites. But in 1924, Ibn Saud and his Wahabis stormed down from the remote desert and swept the soft-living Hashemites into the sea. Like avenging angels, they drove the prostitutes from the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, smashed the tombs not hallowed by the Koran. Wahabi vigilantes roved the streets, wrecking shops that failed to close at prayer time, beating those caught smoking, ruling the land in an austere discipline that Arabia had not known in centuries.

Ibn Saud, the Old Lion, reared his son in the stern tradition of the desert. Saud's formal schooling consisted of the Koran, and ended at 13. But he learned the slashing swordsmanship of the Arab horseman; and as late as 1929, young Prince Saud was dealing with a domestic crisis by the simpler method of chopping off the heads of captured tribesmen. Once he saved his father's life by leaping between him and an assassin, taking the descending knife in his shoulder. Saud's concepts of government were formed in a land where there are few inner boundaries, and sheiks control not a domain but a tribe constantly on the move as their flocks wander in search of pasture. The Old Lion ruled them through the power of the sword, held their allegiance with the promise of protection and with gifts, cemented it with his prodigious sexual prowess. He used to take a sheik's daughter as wife for a night, divorce her next day with royal gifts--leaving the tribe well pleased at the honor and perhaps contributing one more to his proud total of 40 sons and uncounted daughters.

Wealth & Whim. By the time the oil came, the Old Lion was failing. He never understood the dimensions of his new wealth, still less what to do with it. By tradition, everything in the country belongs to the King, and he treated this wealth as a personal possession. His sons, given bottomless allowances for travel abroad, poured out of Arabia and into the gay spots of the Middle East. Soon the Middle East seethed with stories of their excesses. Nearly every Cairo nightclub had its Saudi prince surrounded by procurers and willing belly dancers. There were stories of a $15 tip given a waiter for a box of matches, of girls getting diamond rings just by admiring them, of a drunken Saudi prince staggering into an "exclusive Egyptian club shouting: "Pigs, stand up in the presence of a prince of the royal house of Saud."

Within Saudi Arabia princes built palaces for their private comfort, hotels and apartment houses for their private profit. Officials and palace hangers-on made fortunes in kickbacks and invested their profits in Egyptian or Lebanese real estate. When a Western diplomat tried to hint to Ibn Saud that his money was being stolen by corrupt officials, the Old Lion summoned his finance minister and demanded 1,000,000 riyals on the. spot. Soon sacks of coins were stacked around him. Triumphantly, the old king turned to the diplomat, declaring: "As King I must know that there is money available for state needs. This proves that it is available. Beyond that, I am not concerned:"

But the austere old warrior was distressed at the stories of his sons' excesses. He had one publicly flogged for a drunken brawl. "Who would have thought even a few years ago that I should live to see liquor and drugs coming into Riyadh, when we used to condemn even the use of tobacco," he cried. "If it were in my power to choose, I would have doomsday now." When another prince shot and killed the British vice consul in Jiddah because he refused to hand over a visiting English girl, the Old Lion offered the widow his son's life in forfeit (she declined, settled for $70,000 damages). In sorrow and anger, he forthwith banished all liquor from Saudi Arabia. In 1953, the Old Lion died, a stranger in a world he never dreamed of. At 51, Saud became King.

Salaried Splendor. Tall (6 ft. 3 or 4 in.), heavy of frame and slow of movement, Saud scarcely looks the part of a desert chieftain. The eldest of the Old Lion's 38 living sons, Saud was named heir over the objections of some of the family, who considered his young brother Feisal more intelligent and forceful. He has proved himself gentle, patient and kind, with none of the deviousness that has too often given Arab politicians a bad 'name. His brown eyes are warm, but so weak that even with heavy glasses he cannot read ordinary print (state papers must be specially prepared in oversized type). His smile, a trifle practiced, shows a gleam of gold in a front tooth.

More conscious of the outside world than his father (who never left the Arabian peninsula except for two trips to Egypt on the ground that naked-faced women would offend him), Saud seems far more eager to bring its advantages to his backward land. He cut off the allowances of his high-spending relatives and put them on salaries. Now 322 princes of the royal blood get $32,000 a year plus expenses (upkeep of palaces, cars, travel allowances). He installed Crown Prince Feisal as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in a ten-man Cabinet which had few duties but provided jobs for four other princes (each of whom gets $320,000 as salary). But it was not easy to crack down hard. Each prince is the offspring of a mother from a particular tribe, and is regarded as the tribe's special voice in Riyadh palace. Any restraint was taken as a tribal slight. Furthermore, the princely spending had been on such a huge scale that it had become a major item in Middle Eastern trade. Lebanon, which estimated that the Saudis' princely patronage was worth $30 million a year, protested violently over Saud's puritanical parsimony. As a result, no one has paid much attention to a decree banning further export of capital from the country--Prince Feisal is building a $12 million apartment house in Cairo. Prince Talal, among others, owns 14 apartment houses there, and is building himself a palace in Cairo's suburbs.

Saud launched an extensive program of public works, ranging from irrigation dams to cement plants. He has built 36 new hospital buildings, including the King's hospital in Riyadh, which ranks among the Middle East's finest. He has stepped up the education program to which the old king never allotted more than 2% of the government's estimated total revenues. But all Saud's money cannot buy the trained manpower that centuries of illiteracy has denied Arabia. As late as 1947 the graduating class of the government high school totaled twelve students. For lack of trained men, the government's records are still kept in pencil, with no copies. For months the Saudi air force school had no students for lack of candidates with enough education to understand the courses. Millions of dollars of hospital equipment gathers dust for lack of trained medical men who could use it. Jiddah, the nation's biggest city with 200,000 people, has no daily newspaper and only one weekly.

Pilgrims' Progress. Saud has also tried to ease the lot of Islam's pilgrims. Every year 200,000 of them make the long trek to Mecca to kiss the Sacred Black Stone and walk the ritual seven times around the Kaaba. Once thousands died of sunstroke or disease, and local Arabs fleeced them of their last pennies. Saud established first-aid stations, erected sun shelters, built a $3,000,000 quarantine station at Jiddah, allocated $132 million to refurbish the Great Mosque, straighten Mecca's streets, expand its accommodations. The pilgrim's head tax (among the chief pre-oil sources of Saudi income) has been abolished. Says Saud: "Let the pilgrim come. I'll pay the tax. Allah has given me the money from oil."

To Western eyes, progress seems to run into doctrinaire Wahabi puritanism at every turn. An Egyptian physician was rebuked publicly for an article on epilepsy because it challenged the Prophet's statement that epilepsy was caused by jinn. A man who steals pays with the loss of his hand; public amputations are commonplace (one result: Arabia has probably the lowest crime rate in the world). Social reform comes hard when slavery, sanctioned by Mohammed, still exists, though Saudis protest that slaves are well treated and often freed by owners eager to gain credit with Allah (old Ibn Saud used to release one every Friday after prayer). Tax reform is blocked by the Koran's ban on any personal tax on believers except the Zakaah, a small yearly levy paid to the sheik, who is instructed to use it to support his own family and to give the rest to the poor. Thus there are no beggars in Arabia. But the social security system consists of a line of black-hooded women squatting outside the palace wall every Friday to receive a weekly dole.

As for political reform, the Koran says nothing of democracy. Neither does King Saud. Said one official: "The constitution we follow is the Koran. We don't want to replace this with any other thing."

Saud tries hard to be the Koran's conscientious father to his people. He travels the country (nowadays he flies in a Convair, has an air-conditioned trailer driven overland to meet him at his destination), listens to a sheik's troubles, soothes him with a Cadillac, a school or a clinic--given as a favor rather than as a right. But father comes first. In two years observers estimate Saud has set aside $100 million for new palaces. One just completed in Jiddah (cost: $28 million) brings his personal collection of palaces to 24, and another is planned for Dammam. In Riyadh Saud is tearing down the old palace and replacing it with a new one which will cover nearly a square mile, cost an estimated $50 million, and will' include schools for young princes, a hospital, zoo, mosque, tennis court, swimming pool and houses for all Saud's wives, concubines, and sons under 16. In the palaces, green neon tubing spells out Koranic mottoes on garden walls, loudspeakers thunderously relay a news broadcast or the chant of a court poet reciting the Koran.

Nightly Choice. Saud has dazzled Iran's Queen with a gift of $900,000 worth of jewels, bestowed $400 on an Indian peasant for a cup of tea. But his personal life is curiously austere. He wears no crown or special mark of his kingship; the gold cords that bind his headcloth are worn by several other royal princes. He rises every morning at 4 to read the Koran, prays five times a day in the mosque or on a prayer rug laid out in the garden. Mornings he goes to the Majlis hall, where back-country sheiks come to demand judgment of their quarrels or just sit silently. Afternoons, he likes to watch his sons playing soccer or basketball. After dinner the King retires to his harem for half an hour's talk with his women and presumably to make his choice for the night. No Saudi sees anything wrong in a King maintaining 80 or 90 women; in Saudi eyes, sexual prowess is an admired characteristic of leadership. The women line up as he appears. Each kisses his hand and brings it to her forehead in token of obedience as he passes along the line. Reportedly, they are young and old, ugly and lovely, range from black to white. Since the Koran stipulates no man shall have more than four wives at a time, he presumably keeps no more than three as his official wives, and changes the fourth as the occasion arises.

After evening prayers, Saud spends an hour romping with his youngest children, doffing his glasses to play volley ball, or gathering them around him to tell stories. Officials estimate he has "about 25 sons" (nobody bothers to count daughters), "but how can anyone say how many sons he has? He might be having a couple more while we are talking about it." Each son has his own horse and gets a Cadillac and driver when he is about twelve.

American Aid. Saud is helplessly dependent on Americans to maintain the mechanical luxuries his money has bought. Americans run the power plants, the water supply, the airport, the 350-mile Riyadh-Dammam railroad and the Saudi Airline, now the Middle East's biggest. Saud does not let this disturb his kingly authority, makes no clear distinction between Aramco employees and his own servants. One U.S. technician was roused in the middle of the night and ordered to move the shower nozzle in the King's bathroom: the water hit the King on the chest, and he wanted it moved to strike him on the head. Another was summoned to the palace one midnight to install an air-conditioning unit in the room of a woman Saud had decided suddenly to favor with a visit.

But Aramco is always obsequiously anxious not to jeopardize a deal which is one of oildom's most profitable. At 40-c- a barrel (v. $1.03 in the U.S.), Arabian Oil is one of the world's cheapest to produce, sells for $1.90 on the world market. From the beginning, Aramco's operations have been an exemplary display of enlightened management. In 1950, seeing the handwriting writ large across the Middle East by Britain's gathering troubles in Iran, Aramco increased the Saud share in the oil profits to 50%, the Middle East's first 50-50 contract, patterned on the pact made by Creole Petroleum with Venezuela. For its Saudi employees, Aramco has built schools, hospitals, recreation halls and swimming pools. To appease Saudi pride, it has replaced Americans with Saudis as fast as Saudis can be trained. Today its payroll includes 14,000 Saudis v. 3,000 Americans. To avoid any charge of discrimination, Aramco allocates living quarters on a basis of wage scale and competence rather than nationality. Nineteen Saudis who have reached "senior staff" ratings live in the senior staff camp among their U.S. colleagues.

But most of Aramco's Americans come to Arabia with no sense of mission. In Dhahran they have created a Levittown complete with automatic dishwashers, bowling alleys, ladies' socials and nightly movies. Their pay is 25% above comparable jobs in the U.S. and tax free--but they growl about the heat, curse the dust, and count the days until they can return home and buy that restaurant or farm with the money they have saved. Saud's rigid Moslem code imposes added irritants. Books are banned (apparently in fear of subversive literature). Wives are irritated by the Saudi refusal to let women drive anywhere outside the company compounds. Christian worship is forbidden, and services must be conducted surreptitiously by a priest who flies in from Bahrein and gives his profession as "teacher." Both Aramco and the U.S. military advisory groups are forbidden to have Jewish employees, and an American who receives a letter with an Israeli postmark is deported. The ban on liquor is partly circumvented by the construction of home stills in many a ranch house, and by black-marketing which makes Scotch available in Jiddah at $40 a bottle. "We have only one thing in common," said one Aramco employee dispassionately. "They have oil, and we want it."

The Saudis never let Aramco forget that it is a private enterprise allowed to exist only by sufferance of the King. To underline the point, King Saud has gone out of his way to assert his political independence of the U.S. After a four-year trial, Saud politely ejected a Point Four mission on the ground that it was too bossy. In 1953 the Saudi government accepted a military assistance agreement, only to cancel it before it went into effect because it was contingent on too much U.S. supervision. The U.S. was allowed to build the Dhahran airfield itself only with the stipulation that every installation would become Saudi property as soon as completed.

After Suez. In his opposition to Israel, Saud yields to no one. In one of his first published remarks on becoming King he asked his fellow Arabs, "Why don't we sacrifice 10 million of our number" to uproot Israel, which "to the Arab world is like a cancer to the human body." He has vowed Israel's destruction with a venom encouraged by Crown Prince Feisal, who took it as a personal insult when, as Saudi Arabia's U.N. delegate in 1947, he was outvoted in the Assembly. When Britain joined the Baghdad Pact, Saud promptly joined Nasser's bloc in opposition to the Western "imperialists," gave Syria a $10 million loan as an inducement to join too. The Saudi information director began regular swings through Lebanon, Syria and Jordan delivering funds to pro-Nasser newspapers and favored editors and reporters. During the riots in Jordan preliminary to the ejection of Glubb Pasha, Jordan editors received -L-100 notes pinned to articles attacking Glubb.

Then came Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal. Reportedly, Saud got the news in the midst of a state banquet. He rose abruptly and retired to his private chambers--thereby forcing everyone else to leave the table too.

U.S. observers are convinced that Nasser's Suez adventure marked a turning point. There were already signs that Saud had become wary of Nasser. Last spring there were reports of a brief mutiny in the Saudi army instigated by Egyptian-trained officers. Last June 4,000 workers struck at Aramco just before Saud paid a formal visit, greeted him shouting of "oppression" by foreign imperialists. Saud's police beat several demonstrators to death with palm stems. Then, when Nasser flew to Dhahran for a conference, Saud was annoyed to find that the cheers for Nasser were far louder than for himself.

Publicly, Saud loyally backed up Nasser's Suez seizure ("I am with Egypt with all I possess," Saud cabled), helped him out by giving him $25 million in dollars in exchange for Egyptian pounds. But privately, Saud told Nasser of his annoyance that he had seized the canal without letting his allies know. The Saud money which used to be so lavishly spent on promoting Nasser's schemes throughout the Middle East suddenly was cut off. When Nasser called for a general Arab strike to protest the Suez conference in London, only Saud declined to participate. Some Egyptians demonstrated anyway in Jiddah. Police broke up the demonstration and deported the leaders.

In the weeks between the seizure and the Israeli invasion Saud kept a top aide shuttling to Cairo to urge Nasser toward moderation, and sent private word to Eisenhower that he had counsel to give. Former Secretary of the Navy Robert Anderson was dispatched on a hush-hush trip to Riyadh. Baud's counsel: Western intransigence was forcing Nasser into the arms of the Communists. Simultaneously. Saud began a gingerly effort to organize a loose association of Arab leaders which, while not opposing Nasser, still called for restraint. Saud found common cause for unity even with his old Hashemite enemy, King Feisal of Iraq, in their shared irritation at Nasser's expansive talk of "Arab oil" when, in fact, it was Iraq and Saudi oil.

Moderate Voice. When the Anglo-French attack on Suez came, Saud, in the opinion of U.S. observers, did what he had to do--and no more. He closed down the pipeline to Bahrein (a British protectorate), banned sale of Saudi oil to British or French buyers, broke relations with Britain and France, allowed Nasser to use Saudi airfields to fly his Russian jets and bombers to safety, and offered Saudi troops (Nasser declined them as unneeded). In return, he had one urgent favor to ask of Nasser: that he ask the Syrians not to blow up Tapline, the pipeline that carries a third of Aramco's production through Arabia and Syria to the Mediterranean. Reportedly, Nasser obliged --by making a telephone call to Syria's Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj who agreed. Iraq's Nuri es Said, who waited too long before demonstrating his support of Nasser, saw his pipelines blown up by the Syrian army.

In the Suez aftermath, all Middle East states are suffering from loss of oil revenues. Iraq's revenues are down 75%, Kuwait's by 40%, Saudi Arabia's by about one-third. The cut hurts the Saudis seriously, since they have spent their revenues up to the point of overdraft. The U.S. fully expects King Saud to ask for aid, and expects to give it.

Man Left Out. In Cairo last week. Nasser acted like a man frantically afraid he was being left out. With Saud about to arrive, he hastily called his ally, Premier Sabri el Assali of Syria. Young King Hussein flew over from Jordan. Nasser's purpose: to talk them into replacing the subsidy Britain has for so long paid Jordan to support its Arab legion and base troops there. Nasser obviously feared that, with U.S. help under the Eisenhower doctrine. Saud might do it alone, forming a U.S.-backed partnership with Jordan that had no place for Nasser. It took Nasser hours of talk, including a two-hour session with Saud alone, before agreement came. Reportedly, Saud and Nasser will each put up a yearly $15 million. Syria $7.5 million. The minute his signature was affixed to the document, the silent King Saud hustled out to the airport and took off for Naples.

There he dazzled Neapolitans as his 45-car motorcade swept through the streets to the Excelsior Hotel, where soon two floors were redolent with clouds of the King's special incense and grey-and-purple-robed guards swirled through the lobby. The retinue includes a royal barber, two royal coffeemakers and a special guard with the title "Keeper of His Majesty's Jewels." Only woman in Saud's retinue is the Lebanese nurse of five-year-old Prince Mashur, whose arms are partially paralyzed from some disease or accident in infancy. The King brought the boy along in the hope that U.S. doctors can cure or help him. At week's end, Saud boarded the U.S.S. Constitution for the U.S.

Just what the U.S. and Saud could do for each other in the Middle East was not yet clear to either of them. What was clear was that just now neither could usefully declare himself out loud: Saud, for example, could not be expected to denounce Nasser.

The feudal desert King, in his three years on the throne, has shown himself a man who prefers gestures to words, and understandings to contracts. At this time of shifting allegiances in the Middle East, it was a significant gesture that Saudi Arabia's Saud chose to cross the Atlantic at the invitation of "my friend Eisenhower."

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