Prince Muhammad bin Naif is a Saudi royal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, and — briefly — crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In John Kiriakou’s account he was “the golden boy of the Saudi royal family”: a genuinely good man, smart and educated, who Kiriakou believes went to Georgetown, though he hedges the recollection. Nobody, he says, worked as closely with the American government as Muhammad bin Naif did.[1]
He was the son of Prince Naif, who for decades was the Saudi minister of the interior and who became crown prince but died before he could become king.[1][2]
Why his elevation mattered
Kiriakou frames the prince’s significance through the mechanics of Saudi succession. The kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz — Ibn Saud, the father of Saudi Arabia — left no succession plan and around a hundred and fifteen sons, so the crown passed brother to brother: Saud, overthrown by his brothers for mental illness and exiled to Egypt; Faisal, assassinated by a deranged cousin; then Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah, and eventually Salman, with Sultan and Naif both dying before their turn came.[3][4][5]
For years, he says, Saudi watchers had observed that the brothers would run out sooner or later and the line would have to turn from brother-to-brother to father-to-son. Muhammad bin Naif’s naming as crown prince was that moment — the next generation taking power — and in Kiriakou’s summary of the Western view he was the best possible choice: “in the West we love him; he’s smart, he’s shrewd, he was the head of the Saudi intelligence service.”[5][6]
He also notes that the Saudis had historically been consultative about this, with a written family agreement under which the twenty-five or thirty most senior princes would meet on a king’s death to settle the succession, skipping over any brother who preferred life in Paris or London to the crown.[7][8]
The majlis
The setting of the assassination attempt was the prince’s weekly majlis — called a diwaniya in Kuwait, and best rendered, Kiriakou says, as an open house. A young Saudi who is not a member of the royal family comes, kisses the prince on the hand and on the shoulder as a mark of fealty, and asks. Kiriakou’s illustrations are deliberately small: a man about to be married with no money asks the prince to buy his living-room furniture, and is told “Muhammad, talk to this guy and get him living room furniture.” The next man is a taxi driver whose car has broken down: “Abdullah, give this guy a new car.”[9][10][11]
The body bomb
Waiting patiently in that line was a man who, unbeknownst to Muhammad bin Naif or anybody else, had a bomb concealed inside his own body. When he reached the front of the line he detonated it, blowing himself to a thousand pieces — “but he almost kills Muhammad bin Naif.”[12][13]
The attacker was al-Qaeda and had come from Yemen. The operation had been in planning for months, and the device, in Kiriakou’s description, was purpose-built for the method of concealment — “it was incredible craftsmanship.” That the prince survived it at all was, he says, scarcely believable.[14]
Kiriakou has repeatedly been asked whether the attack was directed by Anwar al-Awlaki, and has consistently said the rumour existed but that he never believed it, on the ground that al-Awlaki was “more of a propagandist” and was not operational in any way.[15][16][17]
Hero, then prisoner
Surviving made him a hero in Saudi Arabia. The public reaction, in Kiriakou’s telling, fed directly into his elevation: he was named crown prince to national acclaim, and the CIA invited him to headquarters to give him the highest medal it can award — for having survived the al-Qaeda attack.[14][18]
Then he was overthrown by Muhammad bin Salman — and not merely overthrown but placed under arrest.[18] He remains alive but in jail.[2]
Kiriakou describes the removal as the start of the arrests of every cousin who might pose a threat, beginning with bin Naif.[19][1] Several cousins objected that this could not be done and that they stood with Muhammad bin Naif; one of them died in an aeroplane crash a couple of days later, and another in a mysterious single-car accident on the Riyadh–Jeddah highway. After that, in his account, there was nobody left who could challenge Muhammad bin Salman.[18]
Asked how so young a man had prevailed against better-placed rivals including the intelligence chief, Kiriakou’s answer is fear: once it became clear he was willing to kill his own cousins merely because they might one day pose a challenge, everybody backed off.[20]
His illustration is the billionaire prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who happened to be in Riyadh when the coup took place and who was close to Muhammad bin Naif. He was seized too, and given a choice: execution as a Western spy, execution as a supporter of Muhammad bin Naif, or half his money. He paid, and then returned to the United States as quickly as he could. “It’s like the Hunger Games over there.”[21][22]
Nobody, Kiriakou says, had expected there to be this kind of psychopath in the Saudi line of succession.[7]