'House of Bush, House of Saud': Powerful families, cozy relationship

On Sept. 13, 2001, the United States imposed a nationwide no-fly zone, and yet more than 140 individuals were permitted to leave the country. Nearly all of them were Saudi, and roughly two dozen were kin to Osama bin Laden. Who allowed them to leave? Given that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, what was the rush in squandering what may have been a potential intelligence mother lode?

Craig Unger first reported this story in Vanity Fair. Now in "House of Bush, House of Saud," he places this scenario in the context of a decades-old relationship between the ruling clan of Saudi Arabia and America's most pre-eminent political dynasty: the Bush family. In a year when the president will campaign as tough on terror and homeland security, Unger's book makes essential reading. Not only does it pose disturbing questions about Saudi involvement (wittingly or unwittingly) in 9-11, it presents a frighteningly believable case that the Bush administration's cozy relationship with the royal house of Saud precipitated this catastrophe.

Unger takes us back to the 1960s, when George H.W. Bush was an oilman in Texas drilling the first offshore well for a tiny Middle East country called Kuwait. Bush got out of oil in 1966 to get into politics and wound up head of the CIA just as Saudi businessmen close to the royal family, including the head of Saudi Arabia's most corrupt bank, began investing in Bush's home state. They bought real estate and purchased planes. They bought a bank in Houston with former Texas Gov. John Connally. They developed a skyscraper known as Texas Commerce Tower, which housed Texas Commerce Bancshares, the bank started by the grandfather of James A. Baker, Bush's right-hand man.

During the 1980s, as petro dollars flowed into Saudi Arabia, the Middle Eastern country became a convenient money and weapons launderer in U.S. attempts to stop militant extremism. The United States sent money to Nicaragua through Saudi Arabia, in exchange for arms. During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States supported Saddam Hussein (whom the CIA had first hired as a 22-year-old assassin in 1959) by giving him guns and bombs through Saudi Arabia.

What emerges from Unger's narrative is a portrait of how the elder Bush helped to develop a way of doing business with some of the world's worst thugs which was duplicated, and transplanted, to other regions with staggering naivete. Our alliance with the Saudis proved so convenient that it was used again to prop up the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The Saudis matched our support dollar for dollar, and a scion of the family closest to the Saudi rulers was sent to fight and to build roads: Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia, a country built on a schism between its fabulously wealthy royal family and the generally poor Wahhabi populace, gained extraordinary credibility by supporting bin Laden. But they didn't stop there. They set up and funded Muslim charities, which in turn supported bin Laden. They funded schools that taught extremism. The United States, happy with its ability to cooperate in a covert war with the Saudis and keep oil prices down, looked the other way.

The Saudis began to repay that favor in the '80s. When oil prices were dropping, a Saudi investor close to the royal family bailed out a tiny Texas oil company, Harken Energy, when one of its directors was George W. Bush. The real payoff began when the senior Bush left office and began delivering speeches for the Carlyle Group, an investment firm that used its contacts in government to buy defense contractors on the cheap, secure lucrative contracts for them, including enormous ones in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and then sell those once-discounted contractors at a high profit. In this way, Unger argues, $1.4 billion flowed from the House of Saud to the Bush family and their interests.

Did this relationship cloud the Bush administration's ability to detect 9-11? Unger makes a compelling case that it kept our eyes off the rising extremism in Saudi Arabia. Even after 9-11, Saudi officials refused to freeze bank accounts; they refused to allow Americans to use their soil during the invasion of Afghanistan; and finally, there is even some evidence that a member of the Saudi royal family knew an attack was coming on 9-11.

"House of Bush, House of Saud" may be labeled conspiracy theory, but Unger's research is too cautious and elemental to support that claim. With great care, he has synthesized scattered reports from The New York Times, The New Yorker and other national publications into a narrative that is as chilling as it is gripping. Will the American people carry these concerns into the election? Only time will tell. But to borrow a line from Billy Crystal at this year's Oscars, Craig Unger better be preparing for his tax audit.