Power, Oil, And A $450 Million Painting: Insiders On Saudi Crown Prince's Rise
In January 2015, Saudi King Abdullah, 90, was dying in the hospital. His half-brother, Salman, was set to become king, and Salman’s favorite son, Mohammed bin Salman, was gearing up for power.
The prince, known only by his initials MBS and only 29 years old at the time, had grand aspirations for his kingdom, the most ambitious in its history, but he was concerned that plotters within his own Saudi royal family would someday turn against him. So, at midnight one evening that month, he summoned a senior security official to the palace, intending to gain his trust.
The official, Saad al-Jabri, was instructed to place his phone on a table outside. MBS did the same. The two men were now alone. The young prince was so concerned about palace spies that he removed the connection from the wall, disconnecting the single landline telephone.
According to Jabri, MBS then discussed how he planned to awaken his kingdom from its profound slumber and restore it to its rightful place on the global scene. By selling a part in Aramco, the world’s most successful oil business, he would begin to wean his economy off oil. He would spend billions of dollars in Silicon Valley digital businesses, notably the cab company Uber. Then, by allowing Saudi women to work, he plans to create six million additional jobs.
Jabri was taken aback by the prince’s goal and inquired about it. “Have you heard of Alexander the Great?” was the simple response.
MBS concluded the chat there. A midnight meeting that was supposed to last half an hour had gone on for three. Jabri left the room to find several missed calls on his phone from government colleagues concerned about his prolonged absence.
Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince
The incredible rise to power of the man who leads Saudi Arabia and has control over oil impacts everyone, beginning with how he outwitted hundreds of rivals to become crown prince.
For the past year, our documentary crew has spoken with both Saudi fans and opponents of MBS, as well as senior Western spies and diplomats. The Saudi government was given the opportunity to reply to the allegations presented in the BBC documentaries and this article. They decided not to do so.
Saad al-Jabri held such high positions in the Saudi security system that he was acquainted with the directors of the CIA and MI6. While the Saudi government has labeled Jabri a discredited former official, he is also the most well-informed Saudi dissident to have dared to speak out about how the crown prince governs Saudi Arabia, and the rare interview he has given us is stunning in its complexity.
By speaking with numerous people who know the prince personally, we were able to give new light on the events that have made MBS famous, including the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the start of a disastrous war in Yemen.
With his father becoming increasingly ailing, MBS, 38, is now de facto in charge of Islam’s birthplace and the world’s largest oil exporter. He has begun to carry out many of the ground-breaking initiatives he revealed to Saad al-Jabri, but he is also being accused of human rights violations including free speech suppression, extensive use of the death sentence, and the imprisonment of female rights advocates.
Not a good start
The first monarch of Saudi Arabia had at least 42 sons, including MBS’ father, Salman. The crown has traditionally been passed down among these sons. Salman was raised to the line of succession after two of them died unexpectedly in 2011 and 2012.
Western espionage services make it their job to investigate the Saudi counterpart of Kremlinology: determining who will be the next king. At this point, MBS was so young and unknown that he wasn’t even on their radar.
“He grew up in relative obscurity,” recalls Sir John Sawers, the MI6 chief until 2014. “He wasn’t earmarked to rise to power.”
The crown prince also grew up in a palace where bad behavior had few, if any, consequences, which may explain his well-known habit of not considering the ramifications of his decisions until after he had made them.
MBS first rose to prominence in Riyadh in his late teens, when he was dubbed “Abu Rasasa” or “Father of the Bullet” for allegedly sending a gunshot in the mail to a court that overruled him in a property dispute.
“He has had a certain ruthlessness,” observed Sir John Sawers. “He does not appreciate being crossed. However, this also means that he has been able to implement changes that no other Saudi leader has been able to do.
Among the most welcome developments, according to the former MI6 chief, is the cessation of Saudi assistance to mosques and religious schools abroad that have become breeding grounds for Islamist jihadism, which has a significant benefit to Western security.
MBS’s mother, Fahda, is a Bedouin tribeswoman and is regarded as the favorite among his father’s four marriages. Western diplomats say the king has long suffered from a slow-onset form of vascular dementia, and MBS was the son he looked to for assistance.
Several diplomats told us about their contacts with MBS and his father. The prince would compose notes on an iPad and send them to his father’s iPad to help him figure out what to say next.
“Inevitably, I wondered whether MBS was typing out his lines for him,” remembers Lord Kim Darroch, David Cameron’s National Security Adviser while he was British Prime Minister.
The prince was reputedly so eager for his father to become king that in 2014, he allegedly suggested murdering the then-monarch, Abdullah, his uncle, with a poisoned ring bought from Russia.
“I don’t know for sure if he was just bragging, but we took it seriously,” Jabri tells me. The former top security official claims he saw secretly recorded surveillance footage of MBS discussing the concept. “He was banned from court, from shaking hands with the king, for a considerable amount of time.”
In the end, the monarch died of natural causes, allowing his brother Salman to take the throne in 2015. MBS was named Defense Minister and promptly declared war.
War in Yemen
Two months later, the prince led a Gulf coalition to war against the Houthi movement, which had taken control of much of western Yemen and was viewed as a proxy for Saudi Arabia’s regional adversary Iran. It sparked a humanitarian calamity, putting millions on the verge of starvation.
“It wasn’t a clever decision,” admits Sir John Jenkins, the British ambassador, shortly before the war began. “One senior American military commander told me they had been given 12 hours’ notice of the campaign, which is unheard of.”
The military battle helped a little-known prince become a Saudi national hero. However, it was the first of what his friends perceive to be several catastrophic blunders.
A repeating pattern of behavior emerged: MBS’s preference for acting unpredictably or on impulse over the usually sluggish and collegiate structure of Saudi decision-making, as well as his refusal to grovel to the US or be considered the head of a backward client state.
Jabri goes far further, accusing MBS of forging his father’s signature on a royal edict authorizing ground forces.
Jabri claims he addressed the Yemen war in the White House before it began and that Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, informed him that the US would only support an air campaign.
However, Jabri alleges MBS was so determined to push forward in Yemen that he ignored the Americans.
“We were surprised that there was a royal decree to allow the ground interventions,” Jabri tells me. “He falsified his father’s signature for the royal proclamation. The king’s cognitive abilities were failing.”
Jabri claims his source for this allegation was “credible, reliable,” and connected to the Ministry of Interior, where he was chief of staff.
Jabri recalls the CIA station head in Riyadh telling him how unhappy he was that MBS had ignored the Americans and that the attack on Yemen should never have occurred.
Sir John Sawers, the former MI6 chief, believes that while he does not know whether MBS fabricated the documents, “it is clear that this was MBS’s decision to intervene militarily in Yemen.” It wasn’t his father’s decision, but his father was carried along with it.”
We discovered that MBS saw himself as an outcast from the start, a young man with a lot to prove and a refusal to follow anyone’s rules but his own.
Kirsten Fontenrose, a member of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, believes the CIA’s in-house psychological profile of the prince misses the point.
“There were no prototypes to base him on,” she informs me. “He had boundless resources. He’s never been told ‘no’. He is the first youthful leader to represent a generation that, honestly, most of us in government are too old to comprehend.”
Creating his own rules
MBS’s 2017 purchase of a famous painting reveals a lot about his thinking and readiness to take risks, unafraid to deviate from the religiously strict culture he leads. Above all, he was intended to outplay the West through showy shows of might.
In 2017, a Saudi prince apparently operating for MBS paid $450 million (£350 million) for the Salvator Mundi, which remains the world’s most expensive work of art ever sold. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have created the painting, which represents Jesus Christ as the master of heaven and earth, as well as the world’s saviour. It has been missing for about seven years, since the auction.
According to Bernard Haykel, a friend of the crown prince and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, despite rumors that it hangs in the prince’s yacht or palace, the painting is actually in storage in Geneva, and MBS intends to hang it in an unfinished museum in the Saudi capital.
“I want to build a very large museum in Riyadh,” MBS told Haykel. “And I want an anchor object that will attract people, just like the Mona Lisa does.”
Similarly, his ideas for sports show someone who is both ambitious and willing to challenge the status quo.
Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented spending spree on world-class sport—it is the sole bidder to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034 and has made multimillion-dollar expenditures in organizing tennis and golf tournaments—has been dubbed “sportswashing.”. But what we discovered is a leader who cares less about what the West thinks of him and more about demonstrating the opposite: that he will do whatever he wants to make himself and Saudi Arabia successful.
“MBS is interested in building his own power as a leader,” says Sir John Sawers, a former MI6 chief who has met with him. “The only way he can do it is to increase his country’s might. That’s what drives him.”
Jabri’s 40-year career as a Saudi official ended as MBS consolidated power. Chief of staff for former Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef, he fled the country when MBS took control after being warned by a foreign intelligence service that he was in danger. But Jabri claims MBS texted him out of the blue, offering him his old job back.
“It was bait, and I didn’t bite,” Jabri adds, confident that returning would have resulted in torture, imprisonment, or death. As it was, his adolescent children, Omar and Sarah, were apprehended and eventually imprisoned for money laundering and attempting to flee, allegations they reject. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has demanded their release.
“He planned for my assassination,” Jabri alleges. “He will not rest until he sees me dead; I have no doubt about that.”
Saudi officials have unsuccessfully requested Jabri’s extradition from Canada through Interpol. They believe he was wanted for billions of dollars in corruption while at the Interior Ministry.
However, he was promoted to major general and recognized by the CIA and MI6 with preventing al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.
Khashoggi was killed.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 implicates MBS in ways that are difficult to reject. The 15-man hit team was traveling on official passports and comprised some of MBS’s personal bodyguards. Khashoggi’s body has never been located, and it is thought to have been chopped into pieces with a bone saw.
Professor Haykel exchanged WhatsApp chats with MBS shortly after the assassination. “I was wondering, ‘How could this happen?'” Haykel says. “I believe he was deeply shocked. He had no idea the reaction to this would be so intense.”
Dennis Ross met MBS shortly after. “He said he didn’t do it and that it was a colossal blunder,” Ross claims. “I certainly wanted to believe him, because I couldn’t believe that he could authorise something [like] that.”
MBS has long denied knowledge of the conspiracy, yet in 2019, he stated that he accepted “responsibility” because the crime occurred under his watch. A declassified US intelligence report revealed in February 2021 claimed that he was involved in the murder of Khashoggi.
I questioned individuals who know MBS intimately if he had learned from his blunders or if surviving the Khashoggi incident had emboldened him.
“He’s learned lessons the hard way,” argues Professor Haykel, who claims MBS resents the case being used against him and his country but that a killing like Khashoggi’s will never happen again.
Sir John Sawers hesitantly agrees that the murder marked a watershed moment. “I believe he’s learned some things. However, the personality remains the same.
His father, King Salman, is now 88. When he dies, MBS may rule Saudi Arabia for another 50 years.
However, he has recently revealed that he fears being killed, potentially as a result of his attempts to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations.
“I think there are lots of people who want to kill him,” adds Professor Haykel, “and he knows it.”
Eternal vigilance is what protects a man like MBS. It was what Saad al-Jabri saw at the start of the prince’s climb to power when he ripped the telephone socket out of the wall before conversing with him in his palace.
MBS is still a man on a mission to modernise his country in ways that his predecessors would never have attempted. However, he is hardly the first dictator to run the risk of becoming so brutal that no one dares to stop him from making more blunders.
Jonathan Rugman is a consultant producer for The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince.
Top image: Getty Images
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