SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL:
HOW WASHINGTON SOLD OUR SOUL FOR SAUDI CRUDE
“Saudi Arabia is more and more an
irrational state—a place that spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an
ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that
can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the
global economy to balance on?”
In his explosive New York Times
bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed
how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight
global terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer
turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our government’s cynical
relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and America’ s dependence on Saudi
oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for
further acts of terrorism.
For decades, the United States and Saudi
Arabia have been locked in a “harmony of interests.” America counted on the
Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business
relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious market for the
kingdom’ s vast oil reserves. With money and oil flowing freely between
Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship
with the Saudis and the ruling Al Sa’ud family. But the rot at the core of our
“friendship” with the Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent
that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi
citizens.
In Sleeping with the Devil,
Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi
petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of
bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of
fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international
acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his
experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for
much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of
sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community,
Baer vividly portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly
dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western sentiment
that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes
of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it
can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant
fundamentalist groups—an end game just waiting to play out.
Baer not only reveals the outrageous
excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its
kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots
of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi
Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street;
to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite;
and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist
groups in existence, which the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money
and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own
throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we
continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its
sand—and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying
the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe.
