Free Sleeping With The Devil by Robert Baer

I don’t think Washington has ever been
    able to keep a secret. It’s something a lot more subtle and insidious. It’s what I call a
    consent of silence, or, more politely, deference. (A circumlocution preferred by certain
    ex-ambassadors to Riyadh who have chosen to turn a blind eye to the kingdom’s dissolution.) It
    all begins with fast money, a category in which I include cheap oil. Saudi Arabia has lots of
    money and lots of oil. The country also proved over and over that it was willing to spend it,
    as well as open the oil spigots anytime we asked. With a national capital addicted to fast
    money and cheap oil, complaining about the situation was considered bad form, like pissing in
    the village well. No one wanted to hear it, and no one wanted to do anything about it. The only
    people willing to tell the truth were on the political fringe, and they were smugly dismissed
    as cranks.
        

4. Saudi Arabia - Washington’s 401(k) Plan
        
        IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT serious time in the Middle East, you know it’s
    virtually impossible to pick up a tab. What usually happens at the end of dinner is that your
    Arab friend pretends he’s going to the bathroom but veers off to corral the maître d’, pull him
    out of sight, and pay. It’s done so smoothly, you don’t notice a thing. Another trick is for
    your friend to make sure you end up at a restaurant where he knows the owner: Then there’s no
    way you can pay. Among Levantines, this ritual about who pays for dinner is a sign of
    hospitality; rarely does it involve any sort of quid pro quo. For the Saudis and rich Gulf
    Arabs, it’s a matter of buying and selling people. If you hold yourself out as an alpha dog,
    you have to pick up the tab to remind the other dogs where they fall in the pack.
        During the lead-in to the Gulf War, I was in Paris and got to see this
    money ritual up close. One night I invited four prominent Kuwaiti opposition leaders to dinner
    at the Ritz Hotel, maybe Paris’s fanciest. (Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed had their final tryst
    there before they died in a car accident later that night.) The Ritz was normally too pricy for
    my CIA expense account, but the gritty charm of my usual Paris dives would have been wasted on
    the Kuwaitis. They may not have been royals, but they were fabulously rich.
        As we were about to order, the Kuwaiti minister of petroleum, ‘Ali Al
    Sabah, entered the restaurant, pulling in his wake a score of retainers. Passing our table, he
    nodded vaguely to my Kuwaiti friends, then stopped dead in his tracks when he caught sight of
    me. Normally, Gulf Arabs keep to themselves when they go out at night in cities like Paris and
    London. I was definitely out of place.
        The petroleum minister came over to find out who I was. Shaking hands
    around the table, he pointedly came to me last, trying to make believe I was the furthest thing
    from his mind. I gave up only my name. Make the bastard work to find out what I do for a
    living, I thought to myself.
        “And what brings you to Paris?” he finally asked.
        The minister swallowed hard when I told him I worked at the American
    embassy. In those dark days before Coalition Forces gathered, stumbling across an American
    official meeting with the opposition was certain to ruin a Kuwaiti oil minister’s day. Not only
    did Kuwait’s ruling elite wonder if it was going to get its kingdom back; it was uncertain it
    would be allowed to rule even if it did. Having overrun Kuwait with nary a peep of opposition,
    Saddam Hussein might bypass the Amir and cut a deal directly with the Kuwaiti people to share
    power - the same people I was having dinner with. But that could happen only if the United
    States went along. Hence, the interest in moi .
        The minister paused and then did what he knew best - threw money at the
    problem. With a crooked finger, he summoned the maître d’. “These gentlemen are my honored guests,”