Royal Intrigue, Unpaid Bills Preceded Saudi Ambassador’s Exit
Robin WrightFor more than a year, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador journeyed to college campuses, chambers of commerce, town halls and world affairs councils across the United States in an ambitious campaign to improve his country’s image.
But Prince Turki al-Faisal’s goodwill tour, instead, produced millions of dollars in unpaid bills — and a tale of murky intrigue in the enigmatic desert kingdom.
The debts by one of the world’s wealthiest countries — owed to the very lobbyists, advisers and event organizers hired to promote the kingdom — have left a trail that weaves together bitter princely rivalries, diplomatic subterfuge and a policy clash over one of the thorniest issues of the day: what to do about Iran.
The Washington Post runs a couple of article on Saudi Arabia in its ‘A’ section today.
This one takes a look at the internal politics of the country as it affects its embassy in Washington. Contractors—from lobbyists to event organizers—appear to have gone unpaid for most of the last year. Rather than negligence on the part of the embassy or ambassador, it seems to be a matter of headquarters cutting off behavior it doesn’t support by closing the purse strings. This is a tactic well-understood by the US Congress, but I’m not sure we consider Saudi use of the tactic any sort of advance.
Nor are the reported secret visits by former Amb. Pr. Bandar anything particularly unusual in foreign policy. The role of ambassadors has been deeply undercut by the missions of ‘special envoys’ since at least the time of Henry Kissinger. It’s entirely possible that double tracking by the Saudi government was the cause for Pr. Turki’s decision to leave Washington.
The article has a lot of interesting detail. Unfortunately, too many sources are still anonymous, making it difficult to assess just how much of it is actually true. Nevertheless, there’s certainly a lot going on in the KSA and its Washington embassy. The article is definitely worth reading.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
December:25:2006 - 16:14
A single contractor — Qorvis Communications LLC, which oversees Saudi image-building — has not been paid more than $10 million this year, its entire annual contract, confirms Qorvis partner Michael Petruzzello. Because Qorvis subcontracts to smaller firms, the unpaid bill has left the most high-profile American lobbyists for the kingdom unpaid all year.
I wonder if one of my neighbors who works for Qorvis will lose his home because of this, and what such an outcome would entail. The motives of D.C. lobbyists can be extremely petty. One story is that in the early 80s two lobbyists got drunk and one of them bet the other that he could save from Reagan’s axe the National Aquarium in D.C. – an utterly useless collection consisting mostly of turtles housed in a dripping basement of the U.S. Department of Commerce. By waging a campaign of utter vilification against the Reagan Administration the Aquarium was saved, the bet won, and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year continued to be spent renting office space elsewhere for employees displaced by the turtles.
December:25:2006 - 16:51
It is a bit odd that Robin Wright, who is an old hack, did not once mention in her Post article that Bandar and Turki are additionally related by marriage, as they are brothers-in-law (the sister of one is the wife of the other). If this fact had been mentioned in her article, there might be a bit more skepticism over all of this “rivalry” talk.