The Saudi fear of an election
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Asked in 2024 why the Saudi state would have behaved as he says it did before the September 11 attacks, John Kiriakou answered that all of the offered explanations are probably true at once, and then reached for a conversation from his own first posting.

The diplomat's answer

His first overseas tour with the CIA was in Saudi Arabia, and he maintained relationships with several Saudi diplomats afterwards. One of them told him later on, in the late 1990s, why he was so strongly opposed to democracy for Saudi Arabia: democracy was the last thing they wanted, because if they had an election in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden would be elected president. 

The inference

So part of the problem, Kiriakou concludes, was not necessarily that the most senior members of the Saudi royal family loved al-Qaeda or bin Laden. He thinks they were afraid that the average Saudi loved al-Qaeda and bin Laden.  

And so, he says, they had to walk a fine line: to steal the country's wealth, drink wine, smoke marijuana, have sex with women and go to London and Paris and Monte Carlo and Beverly Hills and live the good life, while appearing to be pious Muslims to their own people.  Many members of the Saudi population, in his account, are fundamentalist true believers who hated the United States, or hated what it stands for, at least in 2001, and were perfectly happy when the attacks took place. He believes the same was true at the working level of the government. 

What he said at the time

Kiriakou pairs this with his own recollection of the day or two after the attacks, when he said to a Saudi friend: my God, do they realise what they've done? Do they realise this is going to result in the deaths of millions of people? They have no understanding of what they've done. 

His account of what the Saudi state actually did, the three princes in Abu Zubaydah's diary, the transfer from the ambassador's wife's account, the entourage member at Crawford, the millions traced through charities, is recorded in Saudi princes and 9/11. His conclusion there is that the Saudis are not friends but enemies, and that the United States should treat them as such. 

No change expected

The prediction Kiriakou draws from the same analysis is unqualified. Asked in 2015 whether the region could be transformed, he allowed that change elsewhere was possible over decades but exempted the kingdom itself: honestly, he said, he does not think there is ever going to be any kind of real change, any revolutionary change, in Saudi Arabia.

He locates the obstacle in the society as much as in the palace, describing a clerical establishment that tells the rulers what to think and a state broadcasting monopoly that spent decades persuading the population that one reading of Sunni Islam was the only true one.

See also

- Saudi princes and 9/11
- Osama bin Laden
- Saudi Aid Priorities
- Omar al-Bayoumi
- Khobar Towers bombing
- Saudi-Iran diplomatic rivalry
