Oil Painting
Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude offers an in-depth picture of dirty dealings.

But Baer's tale is not only an indictment of the Saudi royal family and its excesses. The real target of Baer's criticism is the U.S. government itself. According to Baer, successive presidential administrations have stubbornly ignored the facts about Riyadh and other oil-rich Persian Gulf allies. In the wake of 9-11, of course, the evidence that the Saudis played a significant if not dominant role in those attacks, and in the ranks and leadership of al-Qaeda, was overwhelming. But Baer writes that the U.S. government had for years had plenty of information about the Saudi role in earlier terrorist attacks against Americans, including the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, the 1995 attack on a Saudi National Guard facility, and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Yet, as Baer describes it, "Washington still continues to insist that Saudi Arabia is a stable country. … To listen to Foggy Bottom's spin, you would think Saudi Arabia was Denmark." Until almost a year after September 11, the State Department, for instance, did not require Saudi citizens to appear at a U.S. embassy or consulate for a visa interview. Under a system called Visa Express, Saudis merely submitted their paperwork to a Saudi travel agency that took care of things at the U.S. embassy for them. Indeed, Baer points out, all 15 of the Saudi 9-11 hijackers, though unmarried and unemployed, received valid U.S. tourist visas with which they entered the country to carry out the attacks -- even though U.S. immigration law is supposed to treat such applicants as presumed immigrants and therefore ineligible for a tourist visa. Similarly, the State Department's yearly studies on global terrorism reported favorably on Riyadh's anti-terrorism efforts -- despite the total lack of cooperation Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef gave then-FBI Director Louis Freeh, refusing even to meet with him in the wake of the Khobar Towers bombing. And Baer's former employer, the CIA, didn't bother to write national intelligence estimates on Saudi Arabia because the president "hated reading bad news about the kingdom."
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