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Desert Diplomat
Inside Saudi Arabia Following 9/11
By Robert W. Jordan, Steve Fiffer UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Robert W. Jordan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61234-740-0
CHAPTER 1
In March 1949, J. Rives Childs, the fifth U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, flew to Riyadh to present his credentials to King Abdulaziz ibn Saud and establish our first embassy in the capital city. Childs was an interesting character. Although a career foreign service officer, he was known for his literary accomplishments as much as his diplomatic ones. He wrote four books on the eighteenth-century Italian libertine Casanova and corresponded regularly with the groundbreaking American novelist Henry Miller.
A year before his trip to Riyadh, Childs had published American Foreign Service, a book about the traditions and operations of the U.S. diplomatic corps. The new ambassador was, however, ill-prepared for his meeting with Abdulaziz. Outfitted in Arab robes, as was the custom, Childs and two of his aides entered the royal palace's receiving room. After a brief conversation through an interpreter, Childs shook hands with the monarch, bowed, and backed out of the room. While this kind of exit is de rigueur when meeting the king or queen of England, it is not the preferred method in Saudi Arabia. Childs's aides knew this, but they did not want to embarrass their superior. They left in the same fashion as the ambassador.
Unfortunately, before Childs could make it out of the hall, he backed into a pillar and tumbled to the floor. Moments later, the aides — their eyes forward — tripped over him and also fell. Their robes tangled, the not-so-quiet Americans lay on the ground until Abdulaziz's son Prince Faisal helped them up.
As I flew to Riyadh in early October 2001 to take my post as the twenty-fifth U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, I knew how to enter and exit audiences with the king, but I felt almost as ill-prepared as J. Rives Childs. Today the Kingdom insists that the U.S. ambassador be a political appointee and refuses to grant diplomatic credentials (called agrément) to a career foreign service officer. The Saudis want the ambassador to be a friend of the president who can get the White House on the phone at a moment's notice. They also want someone who can go over the heads of the bureaucrats and who has no government career to protect.
I was not a diplomat familiar with the ways of the region but rather a litigator familiar with the ways of the state and federal courts. I'd received some training in advance of my departure, but world events had intervened to cut short such schooling and hasten my departure. I did not speak Arabic.
It's fair to ask what qualified me, or any other political appointee for that matter, to be an ambassador. Thomas Jefferson strongly believed in "citizen diplomats," people from different walks of life who would bring their private-sector experience to a temporary government role and then ultimately return home to enrich their communities with their added experience and perspective. This seemed like a noble purpose, and I hoped that my background might add something to the effort.
A little about that background:
I was born in 1945 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were a family of modest means. My father worked for oil companies and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Often he lived abroad — in Venezuela, Peru (where I lived when I was a young boy), Libya, Hong Kong (where I lived during one college summer), and Vietnam (during the war). I went to college at Duke on a partial scholarship, graduating in 1967.
Just before receiving my military draft notice at the height of the Vietnam conflict, I was accepted into Navy Officer Candidate School, and then I volunteered for the Naval Security Group, a code-breaking, intercept operation. Because I had studied Russian, I expected to be sent to a minesweeper in the Gulf of Tonkin to monitor Soviet communications. Instead I spent 3 ½ years in the group's Washington headquarters as the administrative officer, effectively the assistant to the station's commanding officer.
During this time, I took night classes at the University of Maryland and received a master's in international relations. My major research project focused on the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. Here I learned how important staff is in influencing policy — a lesson that would serve me well when dealing with visiting senators and congresspersons in Saudi Arabia.
After the navy, I went back home to the University of Oklahoma Law School on the GI Bill. I worked my way through school as a clerk in a firm and was honored to become editor in chief of the law review. After graduating from law school in 1974, I became a trial lawyer in a Dallas firm. A dozen years later, I helped found the newly opened Dallas office of the Houston-based law firm Baker Botts.
In January 1989, I first met George W. Bush in passing at a Washington reception that my firm hosted on the occasion of his father's inauguration. Two years later our paths crossed again, as I successfully represented him in a federal securities investigation that could have derailed his political career before it started.
When Bush ran for governor of Texas and then president, he asked if I would be on call to explain the investigation to the media. In the race for governor, it was a hot topic in the closing weeks of the campaign. Both Bush and his opponent, the incumbent Ann Richards, flooded the airwaves with television ads that featured the letter I received from the Securities and Exchange Commission closing the investigation. Bush highlighted the fact that the investigation was over, calling it an "exoneration." Richards highlighted other words and argued that the matter was simply being closed and was not an exoneration. Bush won in a major upset. In the presidential campaign, the investigation rarely came up.
During this time period, my wife, Ann, and I periodically socialized with the Bush family. We enjoyed a few overnight stays in the governor's mansion and went to some Texas Rangers baseball games together. I was not, however, part of his inner circle.
After the 2000 presidential election was finally resolved, I thought that, at age fifty-five, it might be interesting to work in government for a few years. The president-elect told me he'd like me to serve but that I should be very specific in saying what position I would like. He didn't want to have to figure it out for me.
Having been an attorney for over twenty-five years, served as president of the Dallas Bar Association, and previously represented our new commander in chief, I suggested that perhaps White House counsel would be a fit. But the president-elect told me that he had already penciled in Alberto Gonzales for that post. Since I'd thoroughly enjoyed my time as a naval security officer and my father had served in the navy at Normandy, my second choice was secretary of the navy. Unfortunately, the president indicated he wanted that position to go to what he called a "procurement jock," someone steeped in the arcane ways of military procurement.
There was an opening for associate attorney general, the number-three spot in the Justice Department. But my one-on-one with Attorney General John Ashcroft did not go well. We did not see the world the same way, and he clearly wanted his own people under him, not a Bush guy. That was fine with me.
By spring 2001 I was happily resigned to remaining in the private sector. Then a call came from the White House: Would I be interested in serving as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia? (Or, to be precise, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary.) Hmm. I had lived abroad as a child, had studied a few languages, though not Arabic, and had that master's in international relations. A year or two overseas might be interesting.
But Saudi Arabia? Although I grew up in Oklahoma and practiced litigation involving energy companies in the Lone Star State, I was not a transactional oil lawyer. I knew little about the country. What I thought I knew, however, was closer to the stereotypical view of an intolerant regime that did not treat women well. I was concerned.
Instead of accepting on the spot, I asked for time to think it over. And I took more time than normal, two or three weeks. During one conversation with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, I expressed my reservations.
Andy replied, "Bob, can you do a year? If you can't do a year, then don't do it; if you can, then any additional time you spend will just be on the plus side." I figured I could do anything for a year but still wasn't ready to commit.
Ann was also unenthusiastic. She shared my concerns about the image of how women were treated in the Kingdom, and she thought her own career as a professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas would suffer if she had to take a year or two off from her research. Her specialty was American Indians, and she spent several weeks each summer living on a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota.
Our twenty-two-year-old son, Peter, however, provided an insightful view. It wasn't that he wanted his old man out of his hair halfway across the world. "Dad," he said, "when the president of the United States asks you to serve, you can't say no." I knew he was right.
My law partners also encouraged me to say yes. The counsel I received from one of them, Jim Baker, the U.S. secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, influenced my decision. He said he that of all the political ambassadorial appointments, Saudi Arabia was the most important in terms of having a real impact and a real job to do.
Ray Mabus, a former ambassador to the Kingdom (and later secretary of the navy) whom I consulted, agreed. He said that I'd become the second most important person in Saudi Arabia next to the king, that I would have instant access to the monarch, and that I would be involved in some very important bilateral relationship issues and have a lot of autonomy and independence.
In April 2001 I accepted the offer. Three months later — after I'd filled out all the proper forms and been vetted by the FBI — the president announced my appointment, telling the press, "Bob Jordan is a leader in his profession and in his community. He understands the important relationship that exists between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and I am confident he will be an outstanding ambassador."
At the time of my nomination, we didn't have an ambassador to the Kingdom; my predecessor, Wyche Fowler Jr., had resigned in March. But I was told that most of the ambassadorial confirmation hearings would not take place until early 2002. Such are the ways of Washington. Speaking Arabic is not a prerequisite for the job, but I thought it would be helpful. I made arrangements to take a course later in the fall.
Between July and September, I was briefed by former U.S. ambassadors to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region, by experts at the National Security Council, and by career diplomats at the State Department, including Karen Sasahara, a young foreign service officer who had served a tour in Jeddah, the Kingdom's second largest city; assistant secretary of state for the Near East and former ambassador to Jordan Bill Burns; and ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker, who would go on to ambassadorships in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The briefings were not particularly comforting. Ryan told me that the Saudi man on the street viewed Americans as decadent and immoral.
When I expressed my own reservations about the Saudi state's view of women and Jews, Ray Mabus told me that I'd be dealing with good family people in the government. He and others acknowledged that the Saudis were moving too slowly on the human rights front but suggested I should think of myself as an anthropologist in foreign territory. At the same time others told me, "This is really an awful situation; sort of hold your tongue from time to time and do the best you can."
Absorbing all this information as best I could, I was of two minds. Sometimes I thought, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to tolerate it. I'll do the best I can. I've committed to a year and if I can't stand it, I'll get out. But other times I thought, or at least hoped, Maybe there's a way I can make it better.
I kept thinking of the biblical axiom, "Blessed are the peacemakers." I had not been going to church regularly, but now I returned. Maybe my role, perhaps by providence, was to somehow be a peacemaker, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but regarding the way in which human beings were treated inside Saudi Arabia.
After I received my security clearance, the State Department sent me over to the CIA. I've been there many times now, but my first visit to headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was overwhelming. Entering, you see a wall engraved with the names of agents who have lost their lives in the line of duty. The operation is high tech; you are given little cards and pass through several little gates, weaving through labyrinthine halls to rooms that require special IDs. People speak in hushed tones.
On my visits I was briefed in detail on a number of subjects. Understandably, our country wants to know as much as possible about the leaders and potential leaders of all nations, especially nations as important to our interests as Saudi Arabia. I quickly learned a great deal about the royal family.
The first king of the modern Kingdom, Abdulaziz, ruled from 1932 to 1953. He was a direct descendant of the patriarch of the Saud family, Muhammad ibn Saud, who formed the "First Saudi State," which lasted from 1744 to 1818, when the Ottoman Empire interceded. According to the Quran, a Muslim can have four wives at any one time. He can also divorce and remarry as many times as he wants. Abdulaziz kept quite busy, as he was said to have married a daughter of every tribal chieftain in Saudi Arabia. The king had at least twenty-two wives (presumably within the Quranic stricture to have only four at a time), who bore him some forty-five legitimate sons.
All six kings following Abdulaziz have been his sons, but not all those sons shared the same mother. Rivalries abound, especially among half brothers whose mothers came from different tribes. Crown Prince Abdullah, who had assumed control of the country after his half brother King Fahd was incapacitated by a stroke in 1995, seemed to be Fahd's logical successor. But some of Abdullah's half brothers were said to oppose his ascension to the throne.
Think tanks with an interest in the region also sought me out. The Washington-based Meridian International Center was particularly helpful. Center president Walter Cutler, who had served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia on two different occasions, arranged meetings with up to thirty Saudi experts at a time.
I tried to prepare for my new posting in the same way that I would prepare for complex litigation — by knowing my subject inside out and anticipating the unanticipated. I picked the brains of any expert willing to share his or her insights. My questions fell into two major areas — substantive and administrative.
On the substantive side: How do the senior people in the Saudi government think? What are their priorities? What are they going to be wanting from me, and what do I then want from them on behalf of the U.S. government? What are the issues that are bubbling up? What are the things that don't get covered in the press, that are perhaps secret, but are the really animating issues between the two countries and in their relationship?
On the administrative side: How do you run an embassy? What's expected? How much can I rely on the career people? What are the pitfalls? There was a second part to this: How do I also deal with Congress? With congressional oversight? With the media? With all of the other stakeholders that would have an interest in my success or failure?
Help with the administrative side came in August, when Ann and I attended the Ambassadorial Seminar, aka Charm School 101, in Washington. Over two weeks, ten of us nominees for postings in countries as different as Indonesia, Sweden, and Tanzania and our spouses were taught the ins and outs of running an embassy by former ambassadors, including Tony Motley, who had served in Brazil.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Desert Diplomat by Robert W. Jordan, Steve Fiffer. Copyright © 2015 Robert W. Jordan. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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