Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia About this episode Robert and Dave continue with Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's early adult years and rise to power.
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Transcript 13,408 words · 8 speakers
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0:05 Robert Evans? Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we continue to talk about Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family with our guest, David Bell. Welcome back to the show, Dave. It's been a little while between our first and last recordings.
0:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:21 Robert Evans? Between the first recording and this one. How have you been?
0:23 Speaker 01 I got COVID. Not currently, but I got it.
0:26 Robert Evans? Nice.
0:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I also, Robert, last night, I had a dream about you.
0:31 Robert Evans? You had a dream about me?
0:32 Speaker 02 Say more.
0:33 Robert Evans? Upsetting.
0:34 Speaker 01 All right. So my dream was that we were taking a shower together in bathing suits.
0:40 Speaker 02 Hot.
0:41 Speaker 01 And then I had to-
0:42 Robert Evans? That makes it TV appropriate.
0:44 Speaker 01 Yep. Then I had to poop in the dream and left the shower.
0:48 Robert Evans? Okay, Dave. What are we, where are we building to here?
0:51 Speaker 01 This is the dream. This is the dream. And I went to the bathroom and-
0:54 Speaker 02 Is it the dream? Is it the dream?
0:56 Speaker 01 Yes, because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop in real life. So I was like, oh, thank God, that wasn't like-
1:01 Robert Evans? It's just a dream.
1:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. I had to poop in the dream. So I left the shower and Alex Schmitty was in the bathroom.
1:07 Robert Evans? Our other old roommate.
1:08 Speaker 01 Making coffee in the bathroom. And that was the dream.
1:12 Robert Evans? Classic bathroom coffee.
1:14 Speaker 01 I should have started with the fact that I have terrible dreams. And that was the dream.
1:19 Robert Evans? That doesn't sound like a good one.
1:21 Speaker 01 It wasn't bad. It was fine.
1:24 Robert Evans? I don't know that I'd call that fine. Well, Dave, thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream. I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it among our listener base.
1:32 Speaker 01 Poop shower.
1:33 Robert Evans? People who are going to react normally to your shower story.
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3:21 Robert Evans? You know who else reacts normally to things?
3:24 Speaker 01 Who, me?
3:25 Robert Evans? The Saudi royal family, you know? Cause they're all, they're basically, aside from the billions and billions of dollars in oil money, and the fact that they don't have to work, and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves to them, you know, they're just down-to-earth, regular guys, like Tim the Toolman Taylor, from the show that maybe 20% of our audience remembers.
3:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, the guy, the, the, the, the guy, the criminal guy, Tim Allen.
3:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, Tim Allen, a simple everyman with, who runs a television show out of his house. Anyway, um, so, one of the few, uh, as we've stated, most of like the, the young princes are not super productive individuals, right? They're mostly spending their time kissing ass to try and get like a better cut of the family fortune, um, doing as little as possible and, and grafting off of like the, the money that should be going to support the Saudi state. There's a few exceptions to this rule, right? Mohammed bin Salman, the subject of our episodes is one, his father, the soon to be King Salman is another. And another one of the exceptions to this rule was Mohammed bin Nayef.
4:34 Robert Evans? Born in Jeddah at the end of August, 1959, he had more than a quarter century on his younger cousin. His father was Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, full son of the great King Abdulaziz and a full brother of two other kings, Fad and the new King Salman. He was thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump than anyone ever thought that Mohammed bin Salman was going to be, right? Like, he just kind of seems like a much better bet as which one of these guys is going to actually like make it to the high seat. His father Nayef bin Abdulaziz had been nicknamed the Black Prince and he'd risen to power first when his older brother, the Minister of the Interior, was assassinated by that other prince who was angry about TV being legal. I know there's a lot of princes in this story.
5:18 Speaker 01 And they're all killing each other, yeah.
5:21 Robert Evans? Yeah. Nayef succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now working directly with the Wahhabists, who traditionally had allied with the House of Saud in order to push their hardline fundamentalist policies. Prince Nayef became what the Brookings Institute described as an arch reactionary and he was the orchestrator behind many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism. That's the Black Prince, right? He violently suppressed the movement to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy, like in the UK, telling one interviewer, "I don't want to be Queen Elizabeth," which, who does?
5:58 Speaker 01 Who does? I, you know what, I might take it.
6:04 Robert Evans? Not now.
6:05 Speaker 01 She had like a nice house. She had, yeah, well, not now.
6:07 Robert Evans? She had some corgis, you know?
6:09 Speaker 02 This actually came up on Margaret Kiljoy's show before and we decided I would make a great Queen Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.
6:19 Robert Evans? Yeah.
6:19 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that would be very effective.
6:21 Speaker 02 I would be a great, I would be a great Queen Elizabeth.
6:23 Speaker 01 I'd go mad with power.
6:24 Speaker 02 And I love corgis.
6:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:28 Robert Evans? So he earned, the Black Prince earned his nickname because of how harsh his policies were to the non-citizen worker population in the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when his son, MBN, we've got MBS and NBN, and they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a public person spurning his own country in favor of the West. So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's not interested in attending a school in, in the Arab world. Instead, he goes to like, the oppositist part of the world he possibly can, Portland, Oregon. I know.
6:59 Speaker 01 I was gonna guess Berkeley.
7:01 Robert Evans? While Portland shows up, you're gonna guess what?
7:04 Speaker 01 I was gonna guess Berkeley. Um, but yeah, I was close.
7:07 Robert Evans? No, he goes to fucking, MBN goes to Portland, Oregon for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and Portland State University?
7:16 Speaker 01 Incredible.
7:18 Robert Evans? Yeah, really funny. Uh, he does not graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU. Neither is true. I can't even, I can't even confirm that he got a degree. Everyone says he's got a BA, right? Uh, the book Regime: Stability in Saudi Arabia by Stig Stensley claims that he studied for his master's degree in political science and graduated in 1981. Although, again, no one says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark and PSU and he got a degree. But nobody says where the degree is from. And we've confirmed it wasn't either of those colleges. I don't know. Yeah, Lewis and Clark College, uh, a guy that Mohammed bin Salman sparred with came here. Yeah.
8:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:04 Robert Evans? I don't know, maybe not the best ad. Um, so yeah, I don't know that he actually did graduate. Uh, Stig writes that he took, quote, "Courses on security issues with the FBI from 1985 to 1988, and trained with Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist units in London from 1992 to 1994. In 1994, he began working regularly with his father, Interior Minister Naif in Riyadh." And I think this is a situation where he's probably not that great a student. I don't think he would have qualified to have special training with the FBI and Scotland Yard based on his own merits. But because he's a prince and he's someone who is going to be a big part of the Saudi state. When he, when he expresses, I'm interested in anti-terrorism work, right?
8:47 Robert Evans? I'm interested in like, training with Western law enforcement organizations and counterterrorism. They're all like, well, this is our chance to have a man on the inside. Right? This is our chance to have like a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like a spy, but a guy who's, who we know is like a friend to us, who we feel like we can trust. As opposed to this, this regime's kind of a black box to us otherwise, right?
9:07 Speaker 01 It helps, it helps with your cred. It just put, it's just good. I get it where it's like, all right, you might not, you might not be per, it's like when the X-Files had Stephen King wrote an episode. And they're like, well, he, he probably doesn't know the show, the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King. Let's throw him on there.
9:21 Robert Evans? And he didn't, you know, that episode wasn't best.
9:23 Speaker 01 It was really, it was also heavily rewritten.
9:26 Robert Evans? Yeah, it would have had to be. Yeah.
9:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's about a haunted doll.
9:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, they should have let Mohammed bin Naeif write an episode of the X-Files, you know?
9:33 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
9:34 Robert Evans? He was training with the FBI in the 90s. He could have done it. He must have been watching the X-Files, right?
9:39 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
9:40 Robert Evans? He must have an opinion on Fox Mulder.
9:43 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
9:45 Robert Evans? So it's unclear to me how much the elder and younger Naeif coordinated here. Cause remember his dad, the Black Prince, is this guy who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused on, we need to crack down on anything that like, seems like someone having fun in the kingdom, right? Whereas his son is like, I'm friendly with the West. I went to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI. He's, he's making, he, he's putting out into the world at least image of he's much more of a liberal guy. He's much less of a hardliner, right?
10:14 Speaker 01 I bet he knows where to get some great acid.
10:18 Robert Evans? He probably did at one point.
10:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. Like there's several places in that list where I feel like he knows how to get good acid.
10:26 Robert Evans? Yeah, the FBI Academy, I bet they had some great shit.
10:28 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
10:31 Robert Evans? So it's hard to say to what extent is this, he and his dad are kind of working together, knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the West and can seem like he's modern and someone who can, you know, be arm in arm with the clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity. But there do seem to have been some real clashes between them, right? One of them is over the fact that his dad, the Black Prince, doesn't take seriously the dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Like, he keeps being told, hey, there's something brewing in your country. And he's like, nah, I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are
11:13 Robert Evans? never going to be like, two words that show up next to each other in the public imagination. Per that analysis by the Brookings Institute, Naif was conspicuously slow to recognize that Al Qaeda posed a threat to the kingdom. He'd become friendly with Bin Laden during the Russian Afghan war, when Bin Laden was allied with the Mujahideen, and viewed him as being exclusively focused on defeating the Soviets. Naif believed Al Qaeda's reputation as a terrorist organization was a product of American propaganda, and was sure that Al Qaeda posed no real threat to the kingdom, a delusion he had in common with much of the royal family. Prince Naif was not popular with the CIA. He was seen as uncooperative, and for good reason. In 1996, when Shiite terrorists bombed a US Air Force base in Dharan and killed 19 Americans, the CIA asked Naif for information on the terrorists and their
11:58 Robert Evans? ties to Iran. Despite the kingdom and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Naif stonewalled the US. Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd attack Iran, and he wanted to avoid war. Bruce Rydel, author of that Brookings piece, was a CIA analyst at the time, and he claims the general opinion over here is that Naif was simply un-American. Right? And that's like, I don't want to like, give too much credit to the analytic skills of the pre or post 9/11 CIA, right?
12:26 Speaker 01 For sure, for sure.
12:27 Robert Evans? So my assumption is that Bruce is like, wrong about some part of the analysis there? I think maybe it's just that he's not as much anti-American as he is like, anti having a problem. And if Al Qaeda's a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a problem. Because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are close to Bin Laden, a lot of people in like the ruling class have been funneling money to him and organizations that are related to Al Qaeda. And if they're really dangerous, then there's a big problem. And there's just this, it may just be the deep human need to like, not have a problem, right? That's part of what's going on with Naif here.
13:01 Speaker 01 No one likes to start shit. I get that, where it's like, maybe Obama, maybe he'll, you know, call him Obama, Osama Bin Laden, maybe he'll settle down.
13:13 Robert Evans? Right. He'll calm down. Yeah. And Mbn, his son.
13:18 Speaker 01 Sorry, forgive me. I'm, I'm, I'm less educated on like, what, where, like, what was Osama Bin Laden's position before 9/11? Like, I, like, a lot of people only heard of him until after.
13:30 Robert Evans? He bombed, I mean, he and Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 93, I think it was, right?
13:36 Speaker 01 Okay, so he had a previous hit.
13:39 Robert Evans? Oh, yeah. Now, it's very clear to anyone paying attention that Bin Laden is going to continue to be a problem for like, the, the, the kingdom and its relations with the rest of the world. But there's this big doubt with a lot of guys. It's like, are they really terrorists? Is this the, are the Americans making all this stuff up? Right? And the Black Prince's son, Mohammed bin Naif, Mbn, seems to have been one of the rare people high up in the royal family because of his training with these Western agencies, who actually is like, no, Al Qaeda's probably an issue, and they'll be an issue for us too, right? His, his feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more in line with how the Americans are feeling, right? And so he spends a lot of the 90s burnishing his
14:22 Robert Evans? credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies, being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family who sees things clearly that you can work with. There's a big moment of conflict between the elder Naif and the CIA in 1998. Vice President Al Gore goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia alongside Bruce Riedel, who's now working for the NSC. They met both Naifs and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack the US consulate while they were there. Up to that point, Al Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right? And so now while Al Gore is in country, they bust a plan to attack the consulate while the US vice president there. And that really rattles people. And suddenly Mohammed bin
15:07 Robert Evans? Naif is the only guy who's been saying like, hey, we should be taking Al Qaeda seriously. And suddenly he gets a lot of attention as like, oh, maybe he was right. Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time. And we should be listening to this guy when it comes to security advice, right?
15:23 Speaker 01 It's yeah, going back to like, people don't like conflict, right? And if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem. That guy's a problem. We'll go as long as we can up to the point where it's like, oh, wait, they're gonna hurt me? Oh, well, we gotta do something about this. Oh, my, oh, my goodness.
15:40 Robert Evans? If Al Gore gets killed by Al Qaeda, while I am in charge of security, that probably is a problem for me.
15:46 Speaker 01 That's bad.
15:46 Robert Evans? Like, I probably don't do well afterwards.
15:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I'm finding a new career after that.
15:52 Robert Evans? Yeah. So in 1999, MBN is appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security. By the fall of 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government to talk to about counterterrorism. And then comes 9/11, right? You know, you're well aware. Yeah. So basically, there were some big buildings in New York. And then there weren't as a result of these guys who learned how to fly, but not all the way, right? That's the that's the brief description I would give of 9/11.
16:28 Speaker 01 70% of how to fly. Yeah.
16:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, 70%.
16:31 Speaker 02 Put that in the textbook.
16:34 Robert Evans? Yeah.
16:36 Robert Evans? That's basically what happened, right? There were some other things going on.
16:39 Speaker 02 Like, you're not wrong. That's what's so funny.
16:43 Speaker 01 I hate to sound, listen, I hate to sound really old, but I'm realizing that there are young people now that do genuinely have to like, learn about 9/11 in school now.
16:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, we forgot. All they did.
16:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:56 Robert Evans? So the attacks caused a massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment, right? This is as big a problem as it could possibly be because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.
17:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a pickle.
17:09 Robert Evans? Kind of their deal, right? Bush was rattling his saber at Iraq and they'd had fuck all to do with Al Qaeda. Like, right after the attacks, we start making, it starts becoming clear, we're going to move on Iraq pretty soon.
17:21 Speaker 01 But they had WMDs, Robert.
17:23 Robert Evans? WMDs. So, obviously, if you're thinking about this from the perspective of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up Iraq and they had nothing to do with this. We had a lot to do with this. Not only were 15 of the 19 hijackers Saudi, but a lot of guys in the Saudi royal family were shuffling money to places that wound up getting to Al Qaeda, right? One way or the other.
17:46 Speaker 01 We're in a bar and they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a big problem. He's a big problem. And then he hit somebody.
17:53 Robert Evans? Trade Center, yeah.
17:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then you hit like the guy next to him because you wanted to hit that guy instead. That's essentially it, right? It's like, we already had a problem. We didn't like Saddam for a while and we're like, that's it Saddam, last straw, you did it.
18:08 Robert Evans? Yeah. And so there's this worry that like, well, how do we know they're not going to fuck with us next, right? Because we kind of, we actually have it coming a lot more than Iraq does. And obviously, you know, it's not just that Bin Laden, the guy who plans the attack or does, is seen as planning the attack, is the man, is a Saudi too. But the Black Prince and most of his peers had scoffed at the idea that Al Qaeda was dangerous, you know? It doesn't take a bright person to see that the royal family is in danger here. Mbn is the new blood. He's not tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation. He's got good connections to the US government, particularly in the CIA and the FBI, and he starts using them. And then in 2003, something happened that would electrify his career.
18:51 Robert Evans? On February 14th, on the holy day of Eid al-Adha, Osama bin Laden issued a communique through Al Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the last caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies. This mirrored their behavior supporting the US in its wars against Muslims. He predicted that the US would use airbases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq. The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the kingdom, or at least this was Bin Laden announcing. That he was widening the scope of the existing war to include the kingdom, right? Al Qaeda is now at war with the kingdom, at least with the kingdom's royal rulers. In May, Al Qaeda operatives launched an attack on a Riyadh compound where Western military advisers
19:32 Robert Evans? worked with Saudi officers. Eight Americans and two Australians died, among others. CIA Director George Tenet flew to the Saudi capital and warned the Crown Prince, "Al Qaeda is going to target your family next." Just a few months later, Mohammed bin Naif is made the number two man in the entire Ministry of the Interior. It was a vote of confidence in his ability to orchestrate the kingdom's response to Al Qaeda and to effectively reform its security and intelligence agencies. Tenet would later write that the CIA considered Mohammed bin Naif its number one man in Saudi Arabia. Rydel writes, "MBN led the counteroffensive. The Interior Ministry issued lists of the most wanted Al Qaeda terrorists and then proceeded to hunt them down ruthlessly. Whenever any of the men on a list were eliminated in firefights or ambushes,
20:16 Robert Evans? the Ministry would update the list with the names of the next most wanted Al Qaeda fighters. It was a tough and dangerous time. Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or at least sent their families away. MBN was the face of the Saudi war on Al Qaeda, appearing on television and in the newspapers to explain the threat the kingdom was facing." So he becomes like the number, the figure who is like leading the Saudi war effort against Al Qaeda. He's like both in propaganda, his face is everywhere, and the West sees him as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this response to Al Qaeda violence in the country. And within the royal family, he's seen as the guy who is protecting us from this like surge of violence, from this dangerous and unpredictable network, right?
20:58 Robert Evans? Like he's, he's really, if you're looking at who's going to follow as like, who's going to be of this generation? Like the guy who's in line to be king. Mohammed bin Naif is looking like someone who might be Crown Prince and then king one day, right? Like he's, he's really distinguished himself, far more than bin Salman has. He's really nothing at this point in time, right?
21:19 Speaker 01 Right, yeah. No, he's gonna fight, he's gonna fight Osama Bin Laden. They're gonna fistfight on a volcano.
21:25 Robert Evans? He's gonna fistfight bin Laden and make himself the king, yeah. As, as we know, kings are supposed, you're supposed to, as a king, defeat one dragon. And Mohammed, Osama bin Laden's kind of a dragon, right?
21:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:36 Robert Evans? Yeah.
21:37 Speaker 01 You said he was the perceived designer of 9/11. Does that mean like, was he like the Jon Favreau of it? Like, was it like, oh, there's other people above him?
21:46 Robert Evans? He's the Matt Graining of 9/11. We're like, he's like the basic idea.
21:51 Speaker 01 The other.
21:53 Robert Evans? But he's not like Conan O'Brien has a lot more to do with planning 9/11 than, than, than, than Matt Graining, right? If we're, if we're Simpsonsing.
22:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, like they were, yes. Like he's in charge, but there were a lot of talented people under.
22:07 Robert Evans? Yeah, there's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making, making the show work underneath it. Yes.
22:11 Speaker 01 Got it.
22:13 Robert Evans? Um, who's the David X. Cohen of Al Qaeda? Find out when we come back from, uh, you know, this break.
22:22 Speaker 02 That was a really good one.
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24:03 Robert Evans? We're back. David X. Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of 9/11.
24:09 Speaker 01 Okay.
24:09 Robert Evans? That's right.
24:10 Speaker 01 Thank you.
24:12 Robert Evans? You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto figures within Al Qaeda. Very easy to do. You can graph all of the South Park guys onto a member of ISIS. You know, that's just the way, that's just the way things work.
24:25 Speaker 02 I'm glad to know like where they all stand.
24:29 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah. I would say like South Park has more of an ISIS vibe. Whereas The Simpsons is more like an Al Qaeda kind of deal.
24:36 Speaker 01 So ISIS is like two guys, like two guys and then like, and then like a small handful. But the two guys do all the voices and stuff.
24:46 Speaker 02 Like a, sure, some kind of org chart, family tree type situation to get clarification. Where does Family Guy fall in this matter, Robert?
24:56 Robert Evans? Family Guy just is an act of terrorism.
24:58 Speaker 01 I was gonna say it's one to one, just.
25:00 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's one to one. So we're back and we're talking about Mohammed bin Naif leading the kingdom's response to a surge of terrorism by Al Qaeda inside the country. Now, a major characteristic of Naif's response was a commitment to avoiding the kind of collateral damage that would have made it look like the situation was totally out of control. Right? You don't want to be blowing up too many things or killing too many civilians as you search out for these Al Qaeda operatives because it makes it seem to the people like, maybe the, maybe the royal family has no idea what's going on. Maybe you guys are completely out of your depth here, right?
25:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, you know, these days you can do all sorts of things to civilians, it seems, in the name of searching things. But yes, generally you don't want to do that.
25:48 Robert Evans? You used to be able to, we used to be a proper country, you know?
25:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:52 Robert Evans? So he distinguished himself from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on outreach to the families of dead Al Qaeda operatives. Parents were told their children had been victims and received a degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout from their children's actions rather than being suspected themselves and told that like, your child is... You know, you should be ashamed of your kid. They were told like, no, your, your kid was a victim of terrorism too. Right? And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists. If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets, then more of them are going to be sympathetic to Al Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem.
26:31 Speaker 01 Smart.
26:32 Robert Evans? So he's try, yeah, he doesn't want to do what the US does.
26:35 Speaker 01 I've also, I've, I've used that excuse on my family before.
26:39 Robert Evans? Yeah.
26:39 Speaker 01 To get out of all sorts of things.
26:41 Robert Evans? No, you guys are victims in this too. Yeah.
26:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:44 Robert Evans? His responses were generally seen as effective, reducing Al Qaeda's influence in the kingdom. Perhaps the best evidence of that was the fact that Bin Laden and company considered him a strategic target worth expending resources to take down. Here's how Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on Mohammed bin Naif's life. That focus on engagement almost killed him. In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with Al Qaeda in Yemen, announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to MBN in person. The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him and sat next to him. The man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBN what were described at the time as light wounds. Now, first off, that's rough.
27:29 Speaker 01 A butt bomb?
27:29 Robert Evans? Bad. That's a bad assassination attempt. When a man blows himself up ass first next to you, yeah, you're right next to him.
27:38 Speaker 01 And you set off a butt bomb? That to me, and then it doesn't hurt the person next to him? What that sounds like without knowing more information is that your ass exploded. And everybody turned and went, oh my God, what happened? Are you okay? And you're on the ground like, I need help. My ass just exploded. Like, I might even try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb. I was just like, I don't know what happened.
27:59 Robert Evans? An accident, an accident. No, I think he blows into pieces because as, as a spoiler, the public note is that MBN was barely wounded. He's, there's a lot of evidence that he's pretty badly hurt by this, that maybe he's actually never the same afterwards. Again, when a man explodes ass first, you're, the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a man's ass. So among other things, you're going to get infected, right? Like his guts and stuff are hitting, are getting, are piercing your body.
28:29 Speaker 01 Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that. A man's ass exploded next to me.
28:37 Robert Evans? Like.
28:38 Speaker 01 That's all I'm talking about for the rest of my life.
28:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, a really unique form of PTSD.
28:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:44 Robert Evans? So the next year, MBN's forces expose an Al Qaeda plot to smuggle bombs into the US via shipping containers. The bombs are intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making MBN into a hero at home and within US intelligence agencies. He continued to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years, where he developed a close working relationship with CIA Director David Petraeus. He also got on tight with John Finer, Chief of Staff for Secretary of State John Kerry. He would later tell a reporter that MBN's people "saved my butt more than once," which, given what had just happened to MBN, they had been literal. John Kerry's worried someone's gonna butt-bomb him?
29:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:24 Robert Evans? No, no, he literally saved my ass.
29:27 Speaker 01 I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it.
29:29 Robert Evans? Yeah. I don't know if he meant that as a joke. I don't know that John Kerry's that funny a man.
29:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then a terrorist somewhere is like, "Oh, I never thought to put the bomb in their butt."
29:40 Robert Evans? In his butt.
29:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:43 Robert Evans? Salman comes to power as king in 2015, as we talked about last episode, and he very quickly removes the guy who had been Crown Prince, that the old king had wanted to succeed after King Salman, and he makes Mohammed bin Naeem the Crown Prince. And this is why, right? MBN is the natural pick to be Crown Prince because he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort, right? He's the guy who protected the country, who saved it from Al Qaeda.
30:11 Speaker 01 Put his ass on the line.
30:13 Robert Evans? Put his ass, he put his ass on the line. He took someone else's ass in an explosion, right?
30:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:19 Robert Evans? And a lot of Americans cheer this development as the best thing to happen to US power in the Middle East for generations. The CIA could hardly have handpicked a better successor. Best of all, as they saw it, Naeem was a legitimate hero in Saudi Arabia. He wasn't someone whose reputation they had to prop up. We don't have to make this guy into a puppet. He's already a hero, right?
30:39 Speaker 01 Right.
30:39 Robert Evans? Um. It's a, it's a great bet. So April of 2015, Naif has made the crown prince and up through 2016, it doesn't seem like Mohammed bin Salman, who again is the subject of these episodes. I know we've had to explain a lot of other guys. He doesn't like he's got any chance of taking the crown or power for himself.
30:59 Speaker 01 He's got real Jeb energy.
31:01 Robert Evans? He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right?
31:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, Jeb. Yeah, it's a real please clap sitch.
31:07 Robert Evans? Got him managing the, the, the family, like a, a office and everything like that. And he's, he's taking on a lot of power for himself, but he doesn't seem very special. And Mbn just seems unassailable, right? Like, how could you possibly compete with this guy? You're 20 years younger. You've never survived an assassination attempt. Mbn is on like his third by this point. You've never fought, prosecuted a war successfully. He's got all these friends in the West. But there are already early warning signs for those who truly understood inter-family power politics within the kingdom. When he appointed Mbn Crown Prince, King Salman also collapsed in Mbn's court, because every one of these
31:47 Robert Evans? princes at this level has their own like royal office. Salman collapses his court into the main royal court. And I think this is streamlined, like he's, he frames it as we're, we need to be more efficient. So we need to like collapse all these courts together so that they, they work more effectively. But the Crown Prince's royal court had always been seen as an important perk and a good way for an ascendant prince to build a base of power for his own future reign. You're picking out people that you want to be loyal to you, you giving them early jobs, ways that they can make a fortune for themselves, right? If you don't have control over your own royal court as Crown Prince, you're losing out on a way to like build power for yourself. And the fact that Mohammed bin Salman is
32:32 Robert Evans? in charge of the royal court allows his 26-year younger son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals with court positions. So you can see already, there's some signs that maybe King Salman doesn't intend for Mbn to ever actually take the throne, right? That maybe he's setting his son up and kind of doing a fuck job on Mohammed bin Naif. Behind the scenes, people close to the royal family begin to whisper even that even as he took on the crown, King Salman was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. In this version of events, just as the king makes MBS his official successor, he's starting to cede a lot of his power and decision-making to his younger son, Mohammed bin Salman, who he appoints as Defense Minister upon taking office, right?
33:17 Robert Evans? That maybe MBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start because King Salman's never all that competent to run anything. So maybe from the jump, from the start of his dad's time as king, MBS is trying to figure out, how can I get Mohammed bin Naif out from being the crown prince, right? And so he's orchestrating all of this, and he makes sure he gets the job as the Minister of Defense because he knows that I want to kick this guy out of power. This guy has already developed a reputation as a war leader for our people, so I need to develop a reputation as a war leader for our people. Planting butt bombs. And he wastes no time. Yep, but he's got to do a lot worse bombs than that, Dave. Right.
33:58 Robert Evans? In March of 2015, Mohammed bin Salman orders Saudi forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war. If you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a series of internecine conflicts since 1962. There have been numerous different sides and coalitions, all backed by foreign powers over the course of these conflicts. And throughout the last half-century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders and princes who have advocated that the kingdom get more directly involved in the fighting. The most recent phase of fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things, by the Arab Spring. In 2011, mass protests forced the current president, a guy named Salah, to resign. His vice president took over for what was meant to be two years, during which time
34:42 Robert Evans? the government would be reorganized into a new federal system and elections would be held. Well, attempts at working out a political arrangement failed. This guy stays in power, and in a desperate attempt to deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies. This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with the no-longer seen as legitimate regime. A rebel group called the Houthis Was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation. The Houthis are a religious minority. They're from the Zaidi sect of Shia Islam, which is like 5% of the population. Shmuel and Zohar Letterman described their motivations in a journal article for the Journal of Genocide Research. The Houthis protested against their political and economic marginalization,
35:25 Robert Evans? as well as the encroachment of Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine on the Sada province in northern Yemen where they were based. So MBS's decision to intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct shock to a lot of his peers and family members. His cousin, the still-crowned Prince NBN, wasn't informed ahead of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen? And the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also isn't told ahead of time, right? None of the people who should know, know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this civil war? And Saudi operations are gonna rely heavily on the guy. Right? It's like, he doesn't tell anybody before he does this. Because he wants it to be his baby. He thinks it's gonna be a big success. That like, immediately, we're gonna, we're gonna kick the Houthis out,
36:09 Robert Evans? we're gonna stabilize the situation in Yemen, and I want all the credit, right?
36:13 Speaker 01 Right.
36:13 Robert Evans? I don't want any of these guys to get credit. Obviously, it's gonna work quickly.
36:18 Speaker 01 Because it always works quickly.
36:21 Speaker 01 It's always fine. Yeah, there's, man, it's a sickness. Like, where you can, it resonates all the way, obviously, today, where world leaders are like, we have created a society where to be like, respected, you have to go into somebody's country and start screwing around and then get all the credit. And it never seems to work out like that way? But I guess it does, because we keep doing it. We're gonna invade Greenland or whatever, where it's just like, that's what world leaders do. They start shit in other countries, so I have to do it too, if I wanna seem like a world leader.
36:57 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's, it'll make me seem powerful. It'll make me, I need to prove that I'm better than the last guy who couldn't do it successfully, right?
37:04 Speaker 01 Should it, should have just paid people to put bombs in their butts?
37:08 Robert Evans? I know.
37:11 Robert Evans? We're all seeing the wisdom of Al Qaeda here, right? You know, simple goals in life. If all you want is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal. No one can take that from Al Qaeda, you know?
37:23 Speaker 01 I have a question, Robert. If you had a butt bomb in you, what would you say before you exploded it next to the person?
37:31 Robert Evans? Hmm.
37:32 Speaker 01 Because I've been thinking about this.
37:35 Robert Evans? That's a good question, Dave. I don't have a good retort in my head right now.
37:39 Speaker 02 I do, I do.
37:40 Robert Evans? Okay, what's yours, Sophie?
37:42 Speaker 02 Oh crap!
37:43 Speaker 01 Oh, that's good!
37:44 Robert Evans? That's good.
37:45 Speaker 01 I would casually turn to them and go, "You ever eat ass before?" And then detonate it.
37:51 Robert Evans? That's a really good one, Dave.
37:53 Speaker 02 That's a good one, Dave.
37:54 Robert Evans? That's a good one, Dave.
37:57 Robert Evans? So, the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in this civil war that does not involve it is that the ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help, right? Which he had, but the most obvious behind-the-scenes justification was that the Houthis had Iranian backing, right? And MBS, along with most of his inner circle, believed the Houthis were nothing but a proxy for Iran, which is a mistake that a lot of world leaders make, which is like, "These people are getting arms, or maybe training, from this other country that's my enemy. They must not be a real group. This must all be a fiction created by this other evil country." As opposed to like, "Well, the Houthis get stuff from Iran, but they have their own base of power. They're their own movement.
38:40 Robert Evans? They're doing a lot right, which is why they've gotten where they are, and they're going to be a lot harder to destroy than you think as a result of all of that." Right? Now, that said, none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send forces into Yemen as almost his very first action upon getting into a position of power. The Leaderman brothers write that, quote, "Mohammed bin Salman seems to have seen what he believed would be a short and easily won battle against the Houthis as an easy way to bolster his image as a military and political leader." And I've come across several other analysts who say the same thing. Nobody ever gives more detail than that, and we don't have any quotes from behind the scenes or whatever. He does not have a very porous office. There's not a detailed, "Here's what was happening."
39:20 Robert Evans? People haven't written a dozen books about being inside his office at this time, right? Because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works. You'll get bone sawed if you do that sort of thing.
39:30 Speaker 01 You will.
39:30 Robert Evans? So, I'm left to assume that even these much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of detail from inside MBS's office, so to speak. And this is one of the most frustrating parts of the story to me, because there's not really a... I don't have a good answer as to, "Why did you think this would work, man?" He'd grown up, and there were good reasons to think a guy like MBS, who seems to be relatively smart, should have known this was a bad idea. He grew up watching the US fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? Like, you saw this fail!
40:01 Speaker 01 We, we, in the previous podcast, we talked about like, you know, teachers weren't allowed to like, give them bad grades. He's not, no one can say no to him. It's, it's, this is, it's, it's a sickness. It's like, if you spend your life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you, by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah, it'll all work out, won't it? You know? What else would like every, everything has told me that. So, yeah.
40:30 Robert Evans? Yeah.
40:31 Speaker 01 Hubris.
40:31 Robert Evans? Yeah. So he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this never hasn't worked in recent memory. He doesn't pay attention to the fact that Gibbons dysfunction was spurred on by the Iraq war. The Houthis attacked former President Salah for having supported the US during the early years of the global war on terror. Somehow MBS seems to have convinced himself that using a mix of air power and mostly foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory against a group he thought was nothing more than an Iranian cutout. This would be proven disastrously wrong. And without any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that Mohammed bin Salman made a really bad decision because he was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was making a mistake. Most sources do seem to agree that he was the deciding and leading voice in Saudi Arabia
41:13 Robert Evans? going to war. Yemeni human rights activist Bara Shabban expressed to Middle East Eye his opinion that Saudi Arabia would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war, no matter who was in power. But MBS made it certain that that involvement would be direct military, right? They would have done something. They would have tried to send some money. They would have tried to, you know, send some form of aid. They would have tried to bribe an official or whatever. But because it was MBS, it was made a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers and planes and try to intervene directly and militarily. Quote, "If it weren't for bin Salman, Saudi Arabia might have influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups." Instead, it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of vicious airstrikes. For the first few months, the Saudi coalition
41:58 Robert Evans? carried out strikes on mostly military targets. They learned a version of the lesson the US is currently failing to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden, which is that you can't destroy a group like the Houthis just by carrying out airstrikes. You can't Bomb them away. It's really hard to bomb people away when they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff. There's caves. There's bunkers. There's just hiding under the fucking sand, you know, like it's hard to kill people that way all as much as you need to. Yeah.
42:29 Speaker 01 It feels like it's every people is unique where if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they know it better than anybody. On top of it's that realization that it's like, it seems like world leaders have just as much like knowledge as I do about how to do a war where I'm like, yeah, I like the movie Top Gun. Let's just do that. Let's just do like pew pew. As opposed to like the boring thing, you know, don't do the boring thing. Don't like fund groups that that you wanna, you know, prevail. No, no, you just, we got all these cool little machines and stuff. Let's send them in. Like it's, everybody wants to do pew pew stuff.
43:04 Robert Evans? Yeah, everybody wants to do pew pew stuff. Nobody actually knows how to do pew pew stuff.
43:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:11 Robert Evans? It's, I mean, the best way to win a war is to avoid getting involved entirely. And the next best way to win a war is to sit on your ass while your opponent bombs the country into ruins and then then come up afterwards and be like, still alive, motherfucker. Those are, broadly speaking, the two best strategies.
43:35 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Don't get into wars. Great. Like I've gone
43:37 Robert Evans? Yeah.
43:39 Speaker 01 Over 40 years now without getting into a war.
43:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, not you invaded any country and there's been temptations, you know?
43:45 Speaker 01 Oh, God, yeah, I've had every reason to, but like,
43:48 Robert Evans? I did. I invaded Belgium once, kind of accidentally, but but I wound up on a train to Germany the next night. So it was okay. Speaking of invasions, why don't you let these ads invade your mental state?
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45:46 Robert Evans? And we're back. So Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific airstrikes. By August of 2015, it has become clear that things are not trending towards a quick and easy win for Mohammed bin Salman and his coalition. In fact, several of his wannabe coalition partners had backed out at the last minute. These were guys he had relied on to provide infanteries because the Saudi Arabian army, not great, and it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young men into a meat grinder. He was really hoping some other young men would do that job. And he winds up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do a lot of the grunt work for him, which is not a great call for either a white variety of reasons.
46:29 Robert Evans? As the summer reaches its apex, the leadermen's right, quote, "A shift could be discerned from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals and similar crucial civilian institutions." Right? So as soon as it becomes like, oh, they're not going to just disappear because we've started bombing them. And we don't actually know where to keep bombing. Like I struck what we're supposed to be all the military targets and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military. I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food. I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools, you know, like that's where we go from there is like, well, I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now.
47:14 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah.
47:15 Robert Evans? Which doesn't make the Houthis less popular, right? The Houthis are more popular now that you're killing society.
47:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's make them victims now. Let's just make them like, yeah, yeah, heroes.
47:26 Robert Evans? As opposed to what he should have done is just set up an entire fake city, like 50 miles down the road from the Capitol and be like, hey, free Gatorade, you know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city. Why don't you guys just come to, we're not fighting. We got no desire to fight, you know, but you know, we have hamburgers.
47:47 Speaker 01 So like a Blazing Saddles situation?
47:48 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like that, you know, I feel like that would work in a lot of wars as opposed to the doing the whole invasion thing.
47:56 Speaker 01 I think we should at least try to do things like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people run into the, the rocks, you know?
48:04 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah. What if we had just set up a second Iraq and, and told everybody, look, you can stay living under the old Iraq, but the new Iraq, free cable.
48:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:16 Robert Evans? You know?
48:16 Speaker 01 I do it. It's right next to New Iraq.
48:18 Robert Evans? Come on over. Yeah.
48:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:20 Robert Evans? Yeah. Suddenly Saddam doesn't even have a country anymore. What's he gonna do? You know?
48:25 Speaker 02 Right, right, romance novels?
48:27 Robert Evans? Exactly. He'd actually have been very happy. He'd have been a much happier man. He was tired of being the leader of Iraq at that point.
48:35 Robert Evans? So, right as this shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying to strike at military targets to just trying to kill civil society in Yemen, Mohammed bin Salman decides, "Well, that's a good day's work. I think I've earned a vacation." "Boy, lot of work fucking up a war. I'm gonna go party. You guys keep blowing up some hospitals or something while I'm gone, okay?" So he gathers a tight assortment of all of his best friends and they leave the capital of Riyadh to party in the Maldives. His people rent out the entire Vela Resort, which had 50 villas and a private coral reef of its own. The hotel's regular employees were paid $5,000 each for one month of work on the condition that they not bring their smartphones
49:19 Robert Evans? or talk to anyone else about what they saw while they were there. Even with this agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants to manage the hotel instead. So none of these guys, most of these guys don't even get to work while the prince is there. Because, as a spoiler, they're bringing a shitload of drugs and prostitutes, right? To party in the Maldives. They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed to do under Wahhabist Islam.
49:41 Speaker 01 It's wild how rich people are a different species and yet the same species too. You can do all that at a Motel 6 for way cheaper.
49:50 Robert Evans? You can. So he invites this insane guest list of a dozen of his personal friends. These are like his friends. These are people, now we do have some names. He invites 150 Brazilian and Russian supermodels. Each is scanned for STDs and then taken to private lodgings on the island.
50:08 Speaker 02 That sounds really scary. Okay.
50:11 Robert Evans? Yeah.
50:12 Speaker 02 Okay.
50:13 Robert Evans? Per the Africa Report, to keep these demanding guests entertained, there were concerts featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star Psy, and Dutch DJ Afrojack.
50:23 Speaker 02 Mr. Worldwide, what are you doing there, Pitbull? Pitbull's in the house!
50:29 Speaker 01 He's getting paid. He's getting paid money.
50:31 Speaker 02 What are you doing there, buddy? Psy, I know to be not a good person. Don't know anything about DJ Afrojack. I am not. But he's a DJ.
50:41 Robert Evans? He's Dutch, too, so I mean...
50:43 Speaker 02 Sorry, stereotyping. So sorry, DJs of the world. Um, but Mr. Worldwide...
50:49 Robert Evans? Mr. Worldwide.
50:52 Speaker 02 Buddy!
50:52 Robert Evans? Yeah, that's right, baby. Yeah, it... Mr. Worldwide, 150 quote-unquote "supermodels", and Mohammed bin Salman and his best friends. All partying on a night.
51:04 Speaker 02 Did they... Did they check the talent for STDs? Or was that just... Was that just the supermodels?
51:09 Robert Evans? Yeah, they checked Pitbull for STDs and the test came back, yes.
51:15 Speaker 02 I'd like to think... Oh! I'd like to think Korean pop star Psy got a full inspection.
51:21 Robert Evans? Yeah, it turns out Psy was just full... Every cell of his body was chlamydia. He's not even a person. He's a sentient colony of chlamydia. Which, you know, makes sense based on this music. So while thousands die horrific deaths from US bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, MBS and his inner circle partied. My favorite detail from this blowout was that one night, MBS got up onstage during DJ Afrojack's set and took over his turntables?
51:50 Speaker 01 Jesus Christ.
51:51 Robert Evans? There's no way he was good! He can't have been good!
51:55 Speaker 02 No, but like...
51:57 Speaker 01 Threats!
51:58 Speaker 02 You don't do that! Doc, not chill. Bad vibes. What happened?
52:04 Robert Evans? The DJ gets pissed off. I mean, I guess everyone at the party is pissed off and no one's allowed to say anything. I'm gonna guess MBS is also coked to the gills during this, right? These, these guys are flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder and probably whatever.
52:19 Speaker 01 Cocaine.
52:20 Robert Evans? Yeah.
52:21 Speaker 01 It makes anybody say, I could DJ. Like, that's what cocaine does.
52:25 Robert Evans? That's what cocaine's for.
52:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:27 Robert Evans? Um, obviously, no amount of threatening hotel staff is going to keep a party like this quiet. And doing this is not a good look for a man who had just started a bloody war that in about a year or so, people are gonna be talking about what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen as a genocide, right? So after less than a week of, I think what was meant to be like a month of partying, MBS was forced to pull up stakes and take his friends back home.
52:51 Speaker 01 Sorry, guys, we gotta go. I did a genocide.
52:55 Robert Evans? I gotta get an eye on this genocide. I know.
52:59 Speaker 01 You guys, you guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying anything anymore.
53:03 Speaker 02 Like, I'm so sorry, Afrojack.
53:06 Robert Evans? I'm yelling timber on this party.
53:08 Speaker 02 Gangnam Style. I'm so sorry, Mr. Worldwide. We can rave later. I'm too busy committing mass murder genocide.
53:19 Robert Evans? If they drop Pitbull on Yemen.
53:22 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
53:22 Speaker 01 I feel like Psy, Pitbull, they probably, they probably have contracts around that where they're like, okay, if they've done a genocide, you never hear about, like, I wish just once I want to hear about, like, James Taylor being at one of these. It's never James Taylor.
53:36 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, James Taylor or, uh, uh, fucking, um, uh.
53:41 Speaker 01 Enya.
53:42 Robert Evans? Enya, sure. Enya playing for the Saudi royal family, why not? Um, civilian casualties mount as the war drags on. The coalition was successful in pushing the Houthis back from their furthest gains in southern Yemen, but no matter how much they bombed, they couldn't make any headway against the capital or any of the other major cities the Houthis controlled. The Saudi war effort was utterly reliant upon the US. The bombs they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as were the planes flown by Saudi pilots. American political support was also crucial to the Saudi war effort. MBS had justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Houthi resistance would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months. As it became increasingly
54:24 Robert Evans? clear this was a fantasy, resistance began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power. Mohammed bin Naif sent his top aide and chief of staff Saad Al-Jabri to DC to inform his American friends that he knew the king's son was an idiot and that the war in Yemen was a mistake. The feeling one gets is that he was fishing for approval from someone in the State Department if he had an outright power struggle with MBS, right? "Hey, I know this is dumb. This war is dumb. You guys hate this too, right? If there's a power struggle, are you gonna be on my side or are you gonna back Mohammed bin Salman, right?" And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass watching the war turn against him. He gets hard to work finding foreign allies, too. Instead of heading straight
55:06 Robert Evans? to the White House, though, he looks closer to home at the UAE. His most important early ally was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nayan, generally agreed to be the guy calling most of the shots in the Emirates. We'll just call him MBZ because everyone else does, too. Okay. And MBZ does not like MBN, right? A common story you'll come across is that during one meeting, MBZ told MBN that his father, the Dark Prince, was so clumsy he proved Darwin was right, which is the kind of blasphemy you can only get away with if you're a Sheikh. We're not even supposed to like Darwin all that much. Like, what are you doing, man? But MBZ is in charge of his own country, basically. He doesn't have to abide by the rules. And so, he starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN and they both
55:50 Robert Evans? want to take this fucker down. Their courts organize a camping trip in the desert where they become fast friends and they start to strategize a way to take out Mohammed bin Salman's older cousin. MBZ's first act in this new alliance was to start reaching out to his American friends and talking up Mohammed bin Salman. This is enough of a success that people in the Obama White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer to get close to the king's son in case he winds up accruing more power. Like so many important things during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because no one was interested or had time to do the job. Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines. "John Kerry was suggested to be MBS's friend but was too busy. Ash Carter, the
56:31 Robert Evans? Secretary of Defense, was MBS's natural counterpart but wasn't interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed but deemed too old." So instead, they pick no one to do this important job. And so there's no one in the US who's-
56:46 Speaker 02 Sorry, they were like, let's have John Kerry.
56:49 Robert Evans? Let's have John Kerry be this kid's friend.
56:52 Speaker 01 I would love to watch John Kerry party with this guy.
56:55 Robert Evans? Yeah.
56:56 Speaker 01 Pitbull there, yeah.
56:57 Speaker 02 John Kerry?
56:58 Robert Evans? Cause MBS loves video games. Like, John Kerry comes in with like a copy of Halo and a six pack. He's like, hey, bro.
57:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:05 Robert Evans? You want a game?
57:06 Speaker 01 They settled on no one and they're like, that's better than John Kerry or Joe Biden.
57:12 Speaker 02 They're like, John Kerry or that, that old guy.
57:16 Robert Evans? Mm hmm.
57:17 Speaker 02 You know?
57:17 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah, you can't trust him for a job as important as being this kid's friend.
57:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, and then four seconds later, they're like, he should be president.
57:27 Robert Evans? He could do that job.
57:30 Speaker 01 I'll say this, I saw John Kerry once at a, um, at a parade.
57:36 Speaker 02 And?
57:37 Speaker 01 St. Patrick's Day parade. And he was, he was walking in the parade and it wasn't like a float or anything. It was just him walking surrounded by like dudes protecting him. And I'll say this, he was visibly drunk. So I, I think he would have partied.
57:52 Speaker 02 All right. John Kerry, the new Mr. Worldwide?
57:56 Robert Evans? That's the coolest story about John Kerry I've ever heard.
58:00 Speaker 02 Sorry, John Kerry, I didn't know, I didn't know your game.
58:03 Robert Evans? Was unfamiliar with your, uh-
58:04 Speaker 02 Unfamiliar.
58:06 Robert Evans? That's good to know.
58:07 Speaker 02 Wow.
58:07 Robert Evans? We could get, get him on an island with Pitbull and 150 supermodels. See what he gets up to.
58:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, gonna need your STD check though, John Kerry.
58:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, no, you don't want to do that. You don't want to know where he's been.
58:22 Robert Evans? So my favorite aspect of this, just in terms of the overall competency of the Obama administration and foreign policy was this, they, they start to get hints that, oh, this kid's going to be important. We probably want him on our side. We should have someone like be his friend. And then they have decide nah, that's too hard. We'll have no one be his friend. You know what administration does find someone to be Mohammed bin Salman's friend? Is the Trump administration. They pick Jared Kushner and Kushner gets very close to MBS because they pay attention to stuff like this. It's just one of these like- Yeah, there are actual areas in which the the Trump administration was more competent than the Obama administration. One of them was knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia.
59:07 Speaker 01 It's still like, all right, I get it, similar ages, but I you can't party with Kushner. That's like partying with a haunted clock. It's just like, there's nothing there.
59:17 Robert Evans? I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with MBS. Yeah.
59:21 Speaker 02 Jared Kushner looks like the skeleton of a fish.
59:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, he does.
59:26 Speaker 02 And they're like, that guy. That's the guy.
59:29 Robert Evans? That guy.
59:29 Speaker 02 I have the thought like, once a month, where I think back to the time, like, early 2016, where where Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's gonna create peace in the Middle East. That's what he's working on. You're like, fish skeleton guy?
59:45 Speaker 01 This guy.
59:46 Robert Evans? You went to Jared. Oh, man.
59:49 Speaker 02 Eee.
59:50 Robert Evans? So, and this is where kind of the fact that Mohammed bin Naif immediately goes to his friends in America and in the Obama administration is like, look, if I have a fight with this guy, do you have my back? And they're kind of gonna be like, we're not gonna get involved in any fights, right? Whereas Mohammed bin Salman's strategy is, I'm gonna start making allies close to home with people that with like, that who will actually back me, right? Who have power, who are near us, and who will support me because they see a benefit in it. I know the US isn't going to take a side in this. I know when we have a power struggle, they don't care. So I'm not gonna waste my time trying to get them on my side. I'm gonna get allies who will actually support me.
1:00:35 Robert Evans? And so while MBN is trusting that like, well, I've spent my whole life building all these connections with the security apparatus in the United States, surely they'll back me if push comes to shove because they want me in power. He learns the lesson like, you actually can't trust the US for anything, bro. We're terrible friends. We don't have your back. We don't have our own back. Like, we're not gonna do shit for you, homie. And as soon as this message comes out, because Kerry sends a message to both Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Naeef that like, we're not going to intervene in any power struggles between Saudi princes. Mohammed bin Salman takes this as a go ahead, or at least confirmation that no one's going to stop him from taking down his older cousin. And he uses the fact
1:01:18 Robert Evans? that Naeef had sent his aide Al-Jabri to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get Al-Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Salman's son, which leaves Naeef isolated. He's now kicked out one of Mohammed bin Naeef's chief supporters, right? And so now he's down a man. The Africa Report summarizes, "In September, Naeef and Al-Jabri learned on live TV of King Salman's plans to fire the latter, thereby depriving the interior minister of his closest aide. A few weeks later, Naeef was getting ready to welcome the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westphal, when the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team in Jeddah. The king's son told Westphal that he needed to see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of time to meet with the crown prince afterwards. But that is not the way things went. MBS dragged out the Teta Tet for so long that the two
1:02:03 Robert Evans? men were unable to meet in the end." Right? He's, he's separating him now from his American friends. He's just kind of isolating him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter around Mohammed bin Naeef. Now, some analysts suspect that the wounds Mbn suffered in that 2009 assassination attempt were more significant than previously admitted. And so he's, that's why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to what his younger cousin's doing. That his, he's got brain damage, basically. And he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of having this injury and he's just not as functional as he used to be, right? So in addition to the fact that he's being outmaneuvered in part because he's just taken too much damage getting to this point in his career previously to hold up against
1:02:47 Robert Evans? someone like Mohammed bin Salman, who's got his wits about him.
1:02:50 Speaker 01 Right. People are like, your, your power's in jeopardy. And he's like, his ass.
1:02:55 Robert Evans? His ass exploded. Right next to me. Can I have more Vicodin? Yeah. So, once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly clear that the Crown Prince does not have the energy or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival. The two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked circles around his older cousin. At one 2016 gathering, he surprised a group of American officials by announcing, "Israel is not our enemy." In the summer of 2016, MBS was in a better position than he had been the year before. Not in terms of overseas ventures, the war in Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe. After a year of failed strikes on military and then civilian infrastructure, the Houthis
1:03:39 Robert Evans? showed no signs of breaking and still held to the capital city and the key port city. Per that article in the Journal of Genocide Studies, quote, "When the Houthis still refused to surrender, the next stage, beginning in the autumn of 2016, was a full-fledged economic war and sealing off of the country. Sanaa Airport was closed off to all commercial flights and to persons requiring medical treatment abroad. Occasional blockades of Al-Hudaya Port were imposed and the Central Bank of Yemen was moved to Aden, which made money transfers to Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government workers to be halted. As Yemen imports over 70% of its food needs, these dips were devastating." MBS had now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the 21st century. As the siege locked into place, he opted for another vacation, this one on the French
1:04:24 Robert Evans? Riviera. During his stay at one port, oh yeah, yeah, no, he's, look, famine's starting out, the war is continuing to go terribly, I'm jitting off to France. He knows how to party. He knows how to party. He's doing a tour of the ports, and while he's in one port, he happens across 135-meter-long yacht, the Serene, owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Scheffler. At the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for $5 million a week. He had fallen in love with the boat and was planning to buy it, but Mohammed bin Salman is not going to let him do that. Next, per the Yachting World website LuxuryLaunches.com, quote, "MBS caught sight of the yacht. It wasn't docked for sale, but that didn't matter." The Saudi
1:05:09 Robert Evans? Crown Prince was instantly captivated as Kevin Koenig tells it, the Saudi prince didn't bother with negotiations or back and forth discussions. Instead, he simply sent an aide to speak with Scheffler and offered an estimated $550 million on the spot. The payment was made in a single wire transfer and depending on the source, the deal was closed within 24 to 48 hours. Scheffler was told to pack up and leave immediately. Now, I do love that like, yeah, he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yacht.
1:05:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, and Bill Gates is in there like, goddamn it.
1:05:42 Robert Evans? I gotta find another yacht.
1:05:44 Speaker 01 Rich people are out of their minds. It's like the only lifestyle where you could be at a party. And it's like, yeah, what does that guy do? He's an actor. What's that guy do? Oh, genocides mostly.
1:05:55 Robert Evans? Genocide, a lot of genocides.
1:05:57 Speaker 02 I don't know what number freaked me out more, five million a week or 550 million in one wire transfer.
1:06:03 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, that's.
1:06:05 Speaker 02 They're both insane.
1:06:06 Robert Evans? That transfer has to be sweating bullets, getting every number right. Like, Jesus. Now, it's unclear to me which of the yachts features MBS fell most in love with. It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine, something called a snow room, which is, I think, just a room where it snows. So you can have snow.
1:06:29 Speaker 01 That's right. I mean, just.
1:06:31 Speaker 02 Or a cocaine lounge, one of the other.
1:06:33 Speaker 01 To New England, man. It's fine. You can get all the snow rooms you want.
1:06:36 Robert Evans? A piano lounge, a movie theater and multiple spas. And I don't know if he even cared about any of that. Is the primary draw that any of that or is it just that Bill Gates wants it? And so like, oh, this must be the best yacht for a rich asshole to own. I have to have it, right?
1:06:50 Speaker 01 It's that.
1:06:52 Robert Evans? It's that. As MBS enjoyed that new yacht smell, starvation was running rampant in Yemen. By December of 2016, charity organization Save the Children estimated that 1,000 children were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen. Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as 2016 ended, but Mohammed bin Salman showed no signs of change in course. And that's part three.
1:07:16 Speaker 02 Sheesh.
1:07:18 Speaker 01 What did we learn?
1:07:19 Robert Evans? How you feeling, Dave? Yeah, what did we learn?
1:07:22 Speaker 02 I mean, I learned a little thing about pit bull.
1:07:25 Robert Evans? Yeah, we all learned something about Mr. Worldwide. That name is literal and includes at least the Maldives.
1:07:32 Speaker 01 I, that doesn't surprise me, I guess. But I mostly learned that if you're gonna put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt. I mean, that's, that's interesting.
1:07:47 Robert Evans? David, no, it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt.
1:07:51 Speaker 02 I just thought of when Dave was going pew pew, that a good, a good combination of the pew pew joke and the ass exploding joke would be to go, hey, pew pew. And the guy goes pew pew and he goes, no, poo poo.
1:08:05 Robert Evans? Sure.
1:08:07 Speaker 02 But I'm a child, but clearly I'm a child.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. I'm there too. I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with a lot of genocide and all I'm retaining is butt bomb from this, so, you know.
1:08:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:21 Speaker 01 That's more about me.
1:08:24 Speaker 02 Wow. Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug at the end here?
1:08:27 Speaker 01 Oh, right. Oh, geez. Yeah, I do podcasts.
1:08:31 Speaker 02 Cool.
1:08:31 Speaker 01 There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed, G A M E F U L L Y, Unemployed, where I, I talk about movies, not a, not genocide as much. I do also, I'm the head writer for Some More News, which is about news. So just like Google Some More News or just Google News. You'll find me, I'll be there. Uh, and that's it.
1:08:54 Robert Evans? Mm hmm. All right, everybody.
1:08:56 Speaker 02 Buy James Stout's book.
1:08:58 Robert Evans? Mm hmm. Buy James Stout's book.
1:09:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:01 Robert Evans? And go to hell, I love you.
1:09:03 Speaker 02 Bye.
1:09:08 Speaker 02 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
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