Free Sleeping With The Devil by Robert Baer Page B

Never Say Never Again; a DC-8,
    where he could rest on a ten-foot-wide bed beneath a $200,000 spread of Russian sable; two
    other commercial-size jets; twelve Mercedes stretch limos; and so on. ( Time estimated
    the cost of Khashoggi’s lifestyle at $250,000 a day in early 1987, servants included, or a
    little over $91 million a year, roughly a quarter of the annual budget of Haiti, a nation of
    seven million people.) At Marbella, there was a small warehouse devoted to nothing but the
    Saudi’s wardrobe: over a thousand handmade suits alone, cleaned, pressed, encased in plastic,
    and ready to be shipped to any golden shore where their owner might happen to wash up for a few
    nights or more.
        None of this normally would make the slightest difference to us as
    Americans. We all grew up with stories about the fabulous wealth of Arab sheikhs and their
    viziers. It started to make a difference, though, when the money slopped over into Washington
    or, rather, San Clemente. In late 1968, days after Richard Nixon won the White House, Khashoggi
    was one of the first to fly out to congratulate the president-elect. He didn’t forget to pass
    on the regards of Interior Minister Fahd - the prince who’d sent him to San Clemente and the
    current brain-dead king. When Khashoggi got up to leave, he “forgot” his briefcase, which
    happened to be stuffed with $1 million in hundreds. No one said a word. Khashoggi went back to
    his hotel to wait for a telephone call. The phone never rang. It never would. A couple days
    later, and Khashoggi knew the trick had worked: Washington was for sale. Like original sin,
    that changed everything.
        You won’t find that tale in the history books. You can barely find
    anyone still alive to confirm or deny it. Having paid out so many bribes in his life, even
    Khashoggi probably doesn’t remember it. I heard the story from a source who was directly
    involved. Is it true? I don’t know. But it’s taken as gospel inside the palaces of Riyadh and
    Jeddah. Thanks to that story and a lot of others, Saudis believe Washington is no different
    from Rabat, Paris, London, or any other capital that has its hand out. And if anyone had any
    doubts, Nixon’s first visitor in the White House was Fahd. Nixon put him up at Blair House, the
    official White House guest residence strictly reserved for heads of state. See: It was all
    about money.
        Five years later, when Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon set out
    for Riyadh hoping to sell T-bills and bonds to a kingdom newly awash in petrodollars, he was
    armed with talking points like a pitchman making cold calls. “Investment directly with the U.S.
    Treasury can provide great convenience and protection against the adverse movements otherwise
    likely to face an investor when placing or liquidating large investments,” read one of the
    slides prepared for Simon.
        The idea was to get the Saudis to underwrite the U.S. budget deficit.
    Eager to become America’s lender of last resort, with all the leverage that implied, the Saudis
    took the bait and happily swallowed it. Soon William Simon and Secretary of State Henry
    Kissinger had cooked up another scheme: the Saudi-U.S. Joint Commission on Economic
    Cooperation, which would create an infrastructure for “the new Saudi Arabia,” one modeled on
    the United States. The Saudis jumped on that one, too, and the commission worked after a
    fashion, a miracle considering Saudi Arabia is a theocratic tyranny without property or
    individual rights. But the only important thing was that the Saudis paid for everything - U.S.
    salaries, Saudi salaries, living expenses for American commission workers detailed to Saudi
    Arabia, the whole shooting match, depositing over $1 billion in a U.S. Treasury account.
        Washington knows fast money when it sees it, but it had never seen
    anything like this. The cookie jar was bottomless. It wasn’t long before the Saudis were
    spreading money