Misguided Monarch

Ex-King Saud so mismanaged Saudi Arabia's affairs that when his own family forced him into exile in 1964, it gladly agreed to pay him a pension of $600,000 a year just to be free of him.

Despite his wealth, which would be welcome almost anywhere in the world, it came as a surprise when Saud's old foe, Gamal Abdel Nasser, last December allowed Saud to take up residence in Egypt. Last week Saud, 65, showed that he is not an ungrateful guest. Flying to Yemen, he gave his wholehearted blessing to the republican regime of Nasser's puppet, General Abdullah Sallal, and declared that he himself is "the only legitimate monarch of Saudi Arabia." Back in Cairo, he went on the air to announce that he had "decided to return home at whatever cost" to reclaim his throne from his brother -- and Nasser's current enemy -- King Feisal.

Pleasure & Pain. Despite the $250 million that he is estimated to have in Swiss banks, Saud's pleasures have lately been somewhat curtailed. He suffers from ulcers and cirrhosis of the liver, has traveled from Beirut to Boston looking for doctors to repair his chronically overworked digestive tract.

Once called "the harem king" by Nasser, Saud now has an entourage of only 40 members, including the four wives permitted by Moslem law and four concubines. He brought 32 limousines and sports cars with him when he moved from Athens to Egypt. As the price of his entry into Egypt Saud reportedly had to pay $5,000,000 into Nasser's treasury. For months, he and his retinue occupied two floors in Shepheard's Hotel, where he nightly entertained guests in the "Scheherazade Salon." Now Nasser has provided him with a suburban Cairo palace that once belonged to King Feisal and has been taken over by the government.

Even though Saud had refrained from any political statements until last week, Feisal cut off Saud's princely pension as soon as he arrived in Egypt and embraced Nasser. His three-day triumphal "state visit" to Yemen was all the more ironical because it was Saud who in 1962 pledged Saudi Arabian support for the royalist guerrillas, who now hold two-thirds of the country and are waging a bloody civil war against Sallal's republicans and the 40,000 Egyptian troops allied with them. Now Saud ridicules the royalists as "conceited fellows," denounces Feisal, who gives them supplies, as "an imperialist." Before departing from Yemen, he grandly donated $1,000,000 to Sallal for reconstruction of the wartorn capital of San'a.

Grim Example. Saud's chances of ever regaining power in Saudi Arabia are almost nil. The country has made far more social and economic gains under the austere Feisal than it ever did under Saud. Even those Bedouin chieftains whose loyalty Saud won in the old days with bags of gold are not clamoring to have him back. The grim example of the 17 Yemeni terrorists whom Feisal recently had beheaded in Riyadh should also discourage dissident tribesmen from siding with Saud.

As for Nasser, his sponsorship of Saud is obviously part of his drive against all the more moderate Arab regimes symbolized and led by King Feisal. In Yemen, Nasser's cause is promoted by Sallal, who last week sent chanting mobs to stone the U.S. AID office in the city of Taiz. Displeased by the low level of U.S. economic assistance, Sallal arrested two U.S. officials on wild charges, said that they would be tried for attempting "to destroy" Taiz by firing a bazooka into an ammunition dump. The U.S. reacted by canceling its aid program and warning Sallal that a break in diplomatic relations could be near unless he frees the Americans.

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