“Whoever wins society will win this war.”says Prince Mohammed bin Nayef”

“We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef”

“If an election were held here tomorrow,” Fahd once confided to a colleague, “Bin Baz would beat us without even leaving his house.”

“That woman,” Bandar liked to say of the British prime minister, “was a hell of a man.”

“on December 7, 2001, Osama announced that he was leaving. “He deserted us,” remembers Al-Hubayshi bitterly. “After five weeks his people came round telling us to make our way to Pakistan as best we could and surrender to our embassies there. We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally. Today I think that I was made use of by Bin Laden—exploited,just like all the young kids who went to jihad. What did he care when he sent us over the horizon to die? He was as bad as the religious sheikhs back in Saudi who preached jihad in theirsermons every Friday. How many of them ever sent their own sons to Afghanistan?”

“America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world’s varied assortment of anti Communist “freedom fighters” than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the “Evil Empire.”

“We were not willing to be the tool of a foreign government,” remembers Sheikh Hassan today. “There were a number of people in authority in Iran who wanted to recruit us againstthe Saudi government. They came to us—they made quite a few approaches to us. But we told them that we wished to remain independent.” His aide Jaffar Shayeb did the political talking on the sheikh’s behalf. “We listened to what they said,” says Shayeb of the Iranians. “But we were never willing tobe part of their games.”