CHAPTER 8

The Last Line of Defence

Ibn Saud employed the Lebanese writer Amin Rihani to write articles for him. King Saud was analphabetic. King Faisal introduced strict local press censorship and forbade the ownership of newspapers and magazines by individuals, families or groups. King Khalid could not deliver speeches which were prepared for him. King Fahd reads nothing, but spends tens of millions of dollars to buy non-Saudi Arab newspapers or to bribe or pressure Arab governments into silencing their press and curtailing its freedom.

Even after 90 years of rule, the House of Saud is naturally inclined against the written word - except those of flatterers. It is firmly opposed to granting the press in Saudi Arabia any freedom, tries to limit the scope of its activity in the rest of the Arab world and, recently and foolishly, used its power to interfere with the traditional functions of the press in other countries, even the United States and the United Kingdom.

Once again, the general impression which exists in the West of such illiberality being an Arab tendency is incorrect. In fact this attempt at controlling or perverting the press is new and does not represent an inherited Arab or Saudi attitude. Independent newspapers which assumed the role of informers and protectors of the public good existed in Saudi Arabia as far back as 1908. Al Hijaz was published in Mecca, and it was followed in 1909 by Al Raked and Al Kibla. The press in the rest of the Arab world began earlier, when Napoleon brought a printing press to Egypt in 1785 and in the nineteenth century healthy journalism flourished in Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

In the early 1960s, when Saudi attempts to 'buy' or control Arab journalists and journalistic establishments began in earnest, an enterprising press which took its responsibilities seriously existed in Beirut, and in other Arab countries it was moving towards greater freedom. The efforts at perversion which occurred under King Faisal represented an attempt to counter Nasser's successful propaganda machine and his hold on the Arab masses. Now, in the absence of an Arab ideological counterweight to Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud has moved beyond total control of its local press and manipulating the press in other Arab countries through money. It is trying to gain complete control of the pan-Arab media and to pressure Arab governments into imposing strict press censorship similar to that which exists in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis' efforts have met with considerable success. This is an extremely serious step backwards; in the absence of parliaments or other channels for popular expression, the media had tried to assume the roles of a natural centre for debate and the protector of the people's right to know. The last line of defence against tyranny has been breached; we are in the middle of a House of Saud-sponsored Arab dark age.

Al Hijaz, Al Kibla, Al Raked and other turn-of-the-century publications in Arabia followed enlightened policies, encouraged healthy discourse and carried articles by writers from throughout the Arab world. They were forced to close down soon after Ibn Saud conquered the Hijaz in 1925. Initially Ibn Saud ordered their editors to promote his regressive policies and their refusal to succumb prompted him to order members of CAVES to arrest the people who read them in public. When this produced unsatisfactory results, he confiscated their printing presses. From early 1925 to late 1927, Saudi Arabia was without a single newspaper or magazine and, because the Wahhabis frowned on reading anything except the Koran and pro-Wahhabi religious tracts, and because Ibn Saud ordered writers to obtain governmental permission before starting a poem, article or a book, there was nothing to read in the new kingdom, not even the mainstream Muslim books which had been around for centuries.

Amazingly, one of Ibn Saud's instinctive responses to the non-acceptance of his Wahhabism was to establish an official newspaper in 1927, Umm Al Khura (The Mother of Villages). This publication was a poor monthly substitute for what had existed before, as it was edited mostly by non-Saudis who did not represent a local point of view and had little interest in the welfare of the people. It took it upon itself to answer all criticism of the Wahhabis and to present a totally new version of Arab history which emphasized the glories of the new monarchy. Beyond trying to get Wahhabism accepted by the majority of the Muslims, it was Umm Al Kbura which initiated the reference to the territories which had been controlled by Ibn Saud's ancestors as kingdoms, instead of the more appropriate territories or regions, and naturally it represented Ibn Saud as the great liberator and unifier of the Arabs.

Despite his committed opposition to writing and writers, Ibn Saud had an obsession with his image, something which concerns all members of the House of Saud to this day. In addition to controlling the overall content of Umm Al Khura, Ibn Saud had articles of self-praise published under his own name. They were written by the mercenary Lebanese Christian writer Amin Rihani, and though some of them dealt with Islamic doctrine and attitudes, in effect they told the world what a wonderful ruler Ibn Saud was. Ibn Saud's use of Rihani as a ghostwriter is in line with his dependence on non-Saudi advisers, though surrendering Islamic issues to a non-Muslim is unique and reflects the ruler's fear that a Muslim writer would have had difficulty with what he had to say. Indeed most would have refused to attack the Shias or to promote Wahhabi strictures at the expense of mainline Sunnism.

Other non-Saudis, non-Muslims and Muslims for hire followed Rihani, and among them was George Antonius, the famous author of The Arab Awakening, and Yusuf Yassin, an adviser-writer who wrote an appalling book called Ibn Saud, Unifier of the Arabs. But while all three served Ibn Saud in return for money it is interesting to note how representative they were of what developed in the 1960s, by which time the Saudis' attempt to control the Arab press had begun to assume an organized form. Rihani and Yassin sold out completely; they wrote what Ibn Saud ordered them to write without hesitation or moral constraint; but Antonius took money under the pretence of doing Ibn Saud's bidding and then felt free to criticize his benefactor's history, behaviour and policies.

Ibn Saud, for valid reasons as well as through short-sightedness, did not see the Arab press in other countries as a threat. There were logistical problems which precluded the sale of outside Arab publications in Saudi Arabia and Ibn Saud did not believe in their ability to influence his people and had little interest in what they had to say within their own countries. Also, their preoccupation with their own internal affairs left them with little room for attention to what was happening in Saudi Arabia. Even the effects of the start of Arab radio in Egypt, Iraq and Palestine in the 1930s were limited. The transmission signals were weak and when they worked very few people in Saudi Arabia had radio sets and most of them were monied people who did not represent any threat because their wealth meant they were close to the throne.

The importance of the Arab press and its possible influence on Saudi affairs assumed importance during the 1950s, when Nasser used Voice of the Arabs radio and the Egyptian and pro-Nasser Lebanese press to attack the House of Saud and its ways. The attacks, like Saud's relations with Nasser, were an on-and-off affair, but Nasser's popularity and the bad House of Saud image they created proved beyond doubt that the Saudi people were susceptible to propaganda and that the power of the press posed a threat with which the House of Saud had to contend.

King Saud's legendary simplicity and openness extended to the way he tried to ignore his local press and allow them some freedom and to bribe Arab journalists. For the most part, he allowed the Saudi press to exercise self-censorship and this led to some healthy developments which included discussion of foreign policy and some criticism of government departments and officials. When Arab journalists visited him, he gave them money without expecting anything in return and during an official visit to Beirut in 1953 he left cash-stuffed envelopes for all the journalists who covered the event.

King Faisal did not give presents, but he expected something just the same. He used the Arab press outside his country to advance his policies and the image of the House of Saud. In the early 1960s, because of Nasser's dictatorial ways, Beirut had replaced Cairo as the centre of the free Arab press. There were hundreds of newspapers and magazines and many Lebanese journalists followed Nasser ideologically or in return for little money. Faisal used Saudi money to prise them loose from Nasser's hold and they proved vulnerable to the lure of substantial Saudi payments. The late editor of the leading Lebanese weekly Al Hawadess, Selim Louzi, divided the Lebanese journalists who took money from the Saudis - then and now - into 'pirates and beggars; the first group threatened the Saudis until they paid them bounty, and the second just begged for money to do their dirty work.' (Louzi was a pirate who took the Saudis for millions of dollars and so was columnist Alexander Riyashi, who wrote to Faisal, 'Pay or I'll tell the truth.') In either case, there were enough Lebanese journalists for hire to work for Faisal. Non-exclusively, some, including a few Christian Maronite journalists, supported Faisal's Islamic stand against Arab nationalism; others attacked Nasser's closeness to the USSR and a third group advanced the image of the Saudi monarch by exaggerating stories of his and his family's good deeds.

Simultaneously, Faisal addressed himself to organizing the press within his country. In 1963 Faisal decreed laws which systematized governmental control of the Saudi press, in order to stunt its growth and its natural bent towards assuming the traditional role of a guardian of the public good. Afraid that a free press meant power, something he was not willing to share or even coun-tenance, he cancelled the right of individuals and families to own publications. Instead all newspapers and magazines were turned into limited-liability public companies the licensing of which was renewed periodically and subject to Faisal's personal approval. He also introduced laws which dealt with who could become a journalist, restricted the contents of publications and stipulated heavy fines and imprisonment for transgressors.

Faisal's attempt in the 1960’s to control the press in the Arab world was a direct response to Nasser's and other Arab nationalist challenges to the traditional regimes. He rented the loyalty of Lebanese journalists not only to counter the propaganda threat to the House of Saud, but to advance his Islamic position and to get Arab public opinion behind it. But Faisal knew better than to try for total control; at that time Lebanese journalists, the object of most of his efforts, could turn to other sponsors and their support of the House of Saud stopped short of being totally illogical or sounding ridiculous. They accepted Saudi guidelines, but blind subservience and tolerating day-to-day editorial interference was against their nature.

In fact, beyond being compared to pirates and beggars, they divided into those who opposed Nasser, the Ba'ath Party and other advocates of pan-Arabism and thus were Faisal's ideological bedfellows and a strictly mercenary group whose only interest was Saudi money. The most important Beirut journalist-editor of the time, Kamel Mroeh of Al Hay'at, cooperated with Faisal because he opposed Nasser ideologically, and money was a vehicle which allowed him to present his well-thought-out, elegantly presented point of view. When Nasser's attempts to intimidate the brave Mroeh failed, he had him assassinated, but, by silencing a voice of moderation and reason, Nasser's move backfired and threw the door wide open for less able and less intelligent people.

Mroeh could not be duplicated; there was no one left who could match his honesty or reasoned attacks on Nasser. There were some pirates left, and Selim Louzi was one of them; but attractive as the word 'pirate' is, most were nothing but blackmailers. Someone who stoops that low will do anything in return for money, and they did. You could always tell how happy a pirate was with the amount of money Saudi Arabia was paying him by the strength of his attacks on his enemies. For example, when he got all he wanted Nasser was nothing but a Soviet stooge who was leading the Arab world to ruin, but if the Saudis were not paying enough, he simply represented a different point of view.

The beggars never withheld their support or moderated it. Their way of responding to inadequate financial support was to try to endear themselves to their Saudi masters by attacking their enemies more viciously. One of them wrote critically of Nasser's wife accompanying him to a meeting with President Tito of Yugoslavia and claimed that her presence was un-Islamic despite the well-known fact that Mrs Nasser was a housewife and a loving mother who never ventured far afield. Another underlined the fact that the Ba'ath Party leadership had some Christians among them and hence they were suspect.

In the 1960s the Saudis' efforts to control the Arab press concentrated on Beirut because it housed most of the pan-Arab newspapers, those which sold beyond the boundaries of their small country. But the campaign was not limited to Lebanon, for there were successful attempts to bribe the editors of strictly local newspapers in Syria, Jordan and Morocco, with the aim of converting the ordinary people of these countries. While Lebanon had a free press which tolerated all shades of opinion, the Saudi effort in other countries needed the acquiescence of the local dictatorship. Except for an occasional Syrian Government which had friendly relations with Egypt or its own objections to Saudi policy, the governments concerned proved forthcoming, for Jordan and Morocco feared pan-Arabism as much as Saudi Arabia did. One of the results of Nasser's defeat in 1967 was a reduction in his hold on the Arab press outside Egypt. Those who had followed him ideologically were also defeated and subsidies to his mercenary advocates had to be reduced. Many Beirut newspapers switched sides and joined the Saudi camp. By the time Nasser died in 1970, Saudi Arabia had replaced Egypt as the country which sponsored most of the privately owned Arab newspapers and magazines in Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Syria.

After Faisal, during the heyday of OPEC and oil at $40 a barrel, Saudi Arabia paid across the board, and it became difficult to find an Arab journalist who did not receive a 'present'. There was a brief period when Iraq sponsored newspapers and magazines which advocated a pan-Arab rather than a Saudi line. But though the pro-Iraqi press proved relatively effective and promoted some constructive exchanges between the progressive secular regional forces and the Saudi-controlled press, it suffered both from an inability to match the Saudis dollar for dollar and the absence of a promotable individual at the helm (Saddam Hussein was never the charismatic ligure Nasser had been). In the 6nal analysis the battle between Iraq and Saudi Arabia for control of the Arab press was an argument between two absolute dictatorships with little popular following - at the expense of the truth.

By 1979 the Saudis' ability to buy all the talent available for sale was complete. But they were still unhappy with whatever opposition to their ways still existed and resented having to rely on outsiders. This is when they tried to extend their control of the Arab press through direct ownership, by having their restrictive internal policies adopted by other countries and by attempts to eliminate their enemies. This restrictive move was expanded beyond the indirect control they had exercised on countries such as Lebanon. The rest of the GCC member countries, some of whom had liberal press laws, were pressured into adopting the Saudi model.

Saudi ownership of the pan-Arab press started in 1979 with the newspaper Sharq Al Awsat, which they edited in London and transmitted via facsimile to printing presses throughout the Arab world. This was followed by the purchase of an did Lebanese newspaper, Al Hayat, which they also edited in London. Women's, sports, business and political weekly magazines in London, Paris and Beirut followed. The financial backing given by the House of Saud to its own publications gave them an edge over the competition, which could not afford news bureaux or modern printing presses, and made it easy for Saudis to pressure the others into joining them in return for financial aid. It was a choice between following a Saudi line or perishing, and by this time the Saudi line meant total Saudization of the editorial content.

Saudi Arabia's decision to have its own pan-Arab publications was coupled with an attempt to influence the press in non-Arab countries, through financial and other pressures. Refusal to grant visas to foreign correspondents and not inviting them to GCC or other meetings, threatening to cancel subscription to wire services, and newspapers' and magazines' syndicated offerings or the outright purchase of the loyalty of some British and American journalists who covered the Middle East are the most obvious methods used by the Saudis. (While I am not suggesting that it ever happened, I find it difficult to believe that the Reuters News Agency, Agence France Presse or the Associated Press would jeopardize their substantial Saudi business and run an anti-House of Saud story.) The sinister, mostly secret activity of trying to influ-ence Western publications has been relatively successful and part of the reason the ugly deeds of the Saudi regime have not received the press coverage they deserve is that major news organizations do not want to alienate the Saudi Government and because some Western correspondents covering the Middle East take bribes.

In the wake of the Gulf War and the total disappearance of Iraq from active participation in Arab affairs, Saudi Arabia has a free hand to dictate its terms to the Arab press, both privately owned publications in Lebanon, London and Paris and the government-run ones in countries which depend on Saudi Arabia for financial support: Egypt, Syria, Morocco and others. At present, the Arab press is divided into a Saudi-owned press, a Saudi-controlled press, a press controlled by the GCC and other countries friendly to Saudi Arabia who are loath to offend it and a small number of publications which oppose them and are fighting against huge odds. And the Saudis are still buying the loyalty of an increasing number of Western journalists.

But they have not stopped at the purchase or direct or indi-rect control of Arabic-language newspapers and magazines and pressuring foreign publications or bribing foreign correspondents. They have broadened their approach to ownership to accom-modate technological developments which affect their overall purpose. They own Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, MBC, an Arabic-language television station in London which serves the expatriate Arab community and transmits to the Middle East via satellite; ANA, the Arab radio station in Washington DC; and Radio Orient, the Arabic-language radio station in France. In 1981 some of their friends bought 14.9 per cent of London's TV-AM through a highly circuitous financial route and businessmen beholden to the House of Saud have bought into mainline London newspapers and are eager to buy more. Recently they acquired United Press International for $4 million.

Nor is having control of the press and placing inexperienced, incompetent Saudi editors in charge enough for the House of Saud, for it has shown signs of wanting to control book publishing (at least two London publishers of books about the Middle East depend on them for their livelihood). Some of my books failed to find Arabic publishers because of fear of Saudi reprisal and one of them was bought by a publisher who, unbeknownst to me, acted rights and then did not publish it. More seriously, in 1982 the Saudis objected to a book about the Mecca Mosque rebellion by the Egyptian writer Ahmad Al Sayyed and to another about the Gulf War by Dr Safra Al Hamadi, and went as far as threatening to cut off aid to Egypt in order to have both books confiscated by the Egyptian authorities.

The Saudis punish publishers of anti-Saudi books by banning all their products from their country and get members of the GCC to do the same. No publisher can afford the accusation of being anti-House of Saud and Quartet books suffered for publishing God Cried, a book about the Israeli invasion of Beirut, because, according to the Saudis, God does not cry.

Among others, the well-known Egyptian writer Muhammad Haikal, Lebanese editor Ghassan Tweini and the Palestinian publisher Abdel Barn Attwan have spoken out against Saudi control of the Arab press and warned of its consequences. But, famous and influential as they are, they are no match for what Saudi money can buy, and the Saudis have been known to hire Arab journalists for ten times their previous salaries. Says Lebanese journalist and media historian Jean Diah: 'The Arab press is in the worst shape since Hidikat Al Akhbar in 1858.' As if to prove him right, recently, in an editorial which exposed the low level to which the Arab press has descended, the editor of the Saudi-owned Al Hayat, Jihad Al Khazen, wrote an editorial in which he accused some of the people who object to the Saudi control of the Arab press of being frustrated Mossad and CIA agents.

The Saudis' hold over the Arab press is one of the most dangerous developments to face the Arab world in the past 50 years. Having retarded the progress of democratic institutions, succeeded in destroying Nasser's pan-Arabism and eliminated Iraq as a base for evil but necessary secularism, their control of the press is aimed at destroying the Arabs' ability to learn, change and advance. But they have not done it alone; they have been aided every step of the way by Arab journalists, Lebanese and Palestinians in particular, whose commitment to money outweighs their attachment to principle and the welfare of the Arab people. Nothing could demonstrate the Saudis' idea of what the press should be allowed to report more than this news item carried by six Saudi newspapers in 1991: 'The Council of Ministers met today and discussed several issues and took appropriate decisions.'

It was Turki Al Sudeiri, a relative of King Fahd, a prince of the realm and editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Al Riyadh, who in 1981 dubbed the Saudi Ministry of Information the 'Ministry of Denials'. He did so in a front-page editorial which attacked the ministry's role in disowning all news that had not been approved by the Government before publication. Sudeiri got off lightly: the Government dismissed him from his job and then reinstated him.

But Sudeiri's ability to survive his burst of anger had more to do with his name and less with a lenient government policy towards criticism. Hamid Ghuyarfi, the editor of the daily Al Youm, was dismissed that same year and never reinstated; in 1982 an Al Youm reporter, Muhammad Al Ah, was arrested and detained for two years; Zuheir Issa Safrawey of the magazine Al Majallab, which is actually owned by the House of Saud, was arrested; and Al Youm 's literary supplement was ordered to suspend publication. A month after Al Al i's arrest a Saudi daily reported a speech by King Fahd in these words: 'What impressed the audience more than his linguistic elegance, frankness and knowledge was his wit and humility.'

The press laws of Saudi Arabia represent a blatant attempt to suppress the truth, deny or distort it until a semi-literate, secretive, ignorant, humourless and arrogant man is turned into the exact opposite. But the censorship and distortion practised by the Ministry of Denials do not stop at re-creating the person of the King and members of his family but cover the reporting of ministers, generals, ambassadors and other government officials. At the same time the laws and regulations of the ministry are stretched seemingly endlessly and in all directions. Religion cannot be discussed except to promote the point of view of the Wahhabi Council of Ulemas - and recently even this has become a problem. The armed forces cannot be written about because everything about them is a state secret. Friendly heads of state may not be criticized lest it undermine the foreign policy of the country. Defamation is strictly forbidden and information about some of the King's friends making too much money out of questionable business deals falls under this heading. Reporting an increase in thefts is tantamount to encouraging it and is forbidden, while reporting the success of movements of which the House of Saud does not approve, like the Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria, is the equivalent of promoting destructive ideology. Promoting women's rights violates the ministry's ~ Stop-Them maxim. Relaying citizens' complaints about the water and telephone companies is an incitement against public order.further explains why control of the press in Saudi Arabia is stricter and worse than in Iran, China and even Iraq (the Iraqi press promotes women's rights and certainly reports complaints about government departments).

There are 13 daily newspapers and seven weekly magazines in Saudi Arabia. Their licensing and what they are permitted to print are controlled by the Press Information Council, which is headed by the Minister of the Interior, Prince Nayef, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Saud Al Faisal, and the Minister of Information, Ali Al Shaer, as the council's two other members. The composition of the council reveals a great deal about its importance and how the House of Saud views its function. In particular, appointing the man who oversees CAVES and the regular police to head it is tantamount to equating the dangers of the press with those of criminality and sedition. Of course, Nayef is a full brother of King Fahd and that is why he, rather than the Minister of Information, is better qualified to assume the important function of protecting the image of the House of Saud.

The control of the Supreme In formation Council on publications begins with their licensing. A special licence to publish has to be obtained from the Ministry of Information, which examines the background of the applicants and ascertains their loyalty to the Saudi throne. In fact prospective publishers are hand-picked for their loyalty to the House of Saud, and I know several people who failed to qualify because they were deemed 'disinclined to take orders'. (Their names are withheld to protect them.) This stage does not stop at approval of the publisher, for the editors' names have to be submitted to the ministry and individually approved. A licence to publish can be approved after that, but every reporter has to be vetted at a later stage, even when he has been around for a while and the publication has been in existence for a long time. But it does not stop there: newspaper and magazine retailers must have a special licence and must be Saudi citizens; selling the written word is too important to be left to foreigners.

Controlling the personnel of a newspaper or magazine goes beyond determining the safety of their inclinations; constant supervision has to be maintained. Editors of all publications are required to meet with Prince Nayef once a month to receive the latest instructions on what is 'permissible' and 'desirable'. Nayef's authority is so extensive that he is empowered to set the price of publications and adjudicate on how much advertising they may carry. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he had to approve the exact words and phrases to be used to describe Saddam Hussein and his allies, Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan. But his powers go beyond the important affairs of state to the selection of which pictures of the King and other members of the royal family to print and how to describe such facts as heavy rain, the arrival of official guests, the Miss World contest in Atlantic City and even how to characterize those who blow their noses in public. The weekly Al Yamama's Muhammad Alawi, in another editorial outburst - they are becoming more frequent among Saudi editors - bitterly asked that journalists 'be given a permanent list of forbidden words and phrases to live with'.

What this situation produces is what the American writer and authority on the Arab press William Rugh described as a loyalist press which does not criticize the King or the regime and presents a totally optimistic picture of the affairs of the country. And in this case the loyalist press is also a state monopoly by proxy. Any attempt by a publication to go beyond the constraints placed on it by the Government is met by fines, the imprisonment of the reporter and/or editor or, in cases where the loyalty of the whole establishment is deemed suspect, the revocation of the licence to publish. Of course, laws and their application do not tell the whole story and the Government uses its control of direct subsidies, subscriptions and advertising to exert pressure and to intercept things before the law has to be applied.

The 1979 Mecca Mosque rebellion, a serious, extremely violent uprising against the House of Saud, is a good case-study of how the Ministry of Information controls the dissemination of information. Because it was an unexpected happening, the press waited for the Ministry of Information to tell them what to say and did not report it for 24 hours. But the ministry, having no idea who the rebels were, could only fall back on guesswork. Initially it accused Khomeini of being behind the insurgents, then it switched direction and accused Sadat of Egypt, with whom the Saudis were quarrelling over Camp David. Later the finger was pointed towards Libya and the PLO and immediately after that the whole thing became a Zionist conspiracy.

Nothing was said about the arrival of Jordanian, British and finally French troops to quell the rebellion after the Saudi armed forces had failed to do it. Nothing was said about the very important fact that the non-Muslim French troops were given special dispensation to enter holy Mecca. And even after the rebels were identified, their nationality was changed and they were described as 'misguided foreign elements', when, except for five of them, they were all Saudi citizens. Needless to say, the official number of the dead and wounded was understated.

The sympathetic Shia rebellion which broke out two days after the start of the Mosque rebellion was not reported, despite the death of over 200 people; nor was the state of high alert ordered for the armed forces throughout Saudi Arabia and the arrival of an unusually large number of American military aircraft at the Dhahran airbase. But there was no hiding the response to the Mosque rebellion, for important members of the House of Saud cancelled their majuses and took to wearing bulletproof vests and using dozens of bodyguards.

After the Mosque rebellion was put down, the House of Saud decided to present this most serious episode as the work of demented religious fanatics. No mention was made of the fact that its leader was a Wahhabi, a former student at Medina 's Islamic University, where one of his teachers had been none other than Abdel Aziz bin Baz, the head of the Council of Ulemas; nor was there any mention of the political reforms he and his followers demanded.

The whereabouts and number of the rebels who surrendered were never revealed and the decision to execute them summarily was announced only on the day of the beheadings. After the executions the press ceased to say anything about one of the most important episodes in the modern history of the country. To the House of Saud the whole thing, including the Shia rebellion, had not happened. The cover-up was so stupid and flagrant that the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post rightly saw fit to question the Saudis' version of events and to point out its contradictions.

Nobody in Saudi Arabia accepted the official, press version of the Mosque rebellion and everybody knew about the Shia uprising. All the denials and attempts at suppression did was to undermine in a serious way what little credibility the Saudi Government still had with its people and to open the door for rumour-mongering. The real story got around through word of mouth and was exaggerated every whisper of the way. Newspaper and magazine editors knew that telling the truth would have done less damage than gossip but kept their own counsel and held on to their jobs.

Unsurprisingly, the handling of the Death of a Princess episode, the killing of the Iranian pilgrims, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers and the presence in Saudi Arabia of hundreds of female GIs were handled in contradictory, stupid ways. An odd situation exists where the line between news reporting and editorializing is non-existent. The pro-House of Saud stories, full of adjectives as they are, are editorials in disguise; and there is no investigative reporting or research -the press never even mentions how a thief entered a house or what effect oil wealth is having on society. In fact, one way to see the Saudi press is to view it as a collection of gossip sheets specializing in the happy news of the House of Saud. A recent issue of Al Riyadh carried 32 happy mentions of the royal household, marriages, births, arrivals, departures, the opening of buildings and attendances at public functions. Inevitably Himself and whatever he does or says consumes a lot of space and accounts for a wealth of glowing epithets.

Beyond the press and the special situation of ARAMCO radio and television in Dhahran, there are the Government-owned radio and television stations, started in 1949 and 1965 respectively. As we have seen from the incident when Fahd wanted the Indian film changed, radio and television programming is subject to the diktats of the House of Saud and most of it can best be described as advocacy programming, an incessant trumpeting of their achievements. Some 40 per cent of programmes are religious- a recital of the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet and Wahhabi interpretations of them - and the rest are cultural and news. There is very little local or Arab entertainment. There are films which, in accordance with the diktats of Prince Nayef, have no violence, sex or tight trousers; no crosses, nuns or priests; no mention of unfriendly countries or references to Israel, communism and venereal diseases. Of course, films cannot tell the stories of Jesus and Moses, though both are prophets to the Muslims, who are commanded to revere them.

Control of book publishing falls somewhere between press journalism and radio and television. Books by Saudi citizens still have to be approved before they are written, and a Saudi writer has to abide by this even when writing a book for a foreign publisher. This has forced into exile the most distinguished Saudi writers of our day, the novelist Abdel Rahman Munif, historian Osama Abdel Rahman and man of letters Abdallah Ghoseim. Meanwhile, the Government prints a considerable number of books and schoolbooks which contain the House of Saud version of history. In them the Shias are heretics, King Saud never existed, the Hashemites never ruled the Hijaz, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is omitted, Karl Marx was a Jew-conspirator and Ayatollah Khomeini is not mentioned. Recently many books had to be re-edited to re-present Saddam Hussein; and the role of the Saudi army during the Gulf War is so exaggerated that you would think nobody else was there.

There is some private publishing, but it is small-scale and the exclusive domain of pro-House of Saud writers. For example, most poetry books are in praise of the King, novels deal with the heroics of the royal family or historical characters acceptable to them and some sponsored journalists provide their own interpretation of modern history to augment textbooks. A recent book about the 1960s Saudi-Yemen War did not once mention the Shia religion of the people of Assir and their affinity with their Yemeni co-religionists; in others, there is no reference to slavery, the existence of the American Dhahran airbase or the original agreements between Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO. Even past kings are de-emphasized, and now it is Fahd who did everything for Faisal and Khalid, who were nothing but front men.

This inclusive control of newspapers and magazines, radio and television, and book publishing is complemented by laws to control imports into the country. Saudi Arabia has strict rules on the importation of newspapers and magazines and audio and video cassettes; new books, because it takes longer to determine their content, are hardly ever allowed in; audio and video cassettes must have prior approval and not only does the regime jam the radio and television signals of unfriendly countries, but people have been jailed for listening to them. Most of the time this policing is carried out by local members of CAVES, some of whom have been known to accuse people of deriving pleasure from listening to anti-House of Saud foreign broadcasts and then arrested them or destroyed their radio or television set.

The Directorate of Publications, which controls press imports, empowers customs officers at all entry points to the kingdom to censor and confiscate foreign publications. Its remit covers pub-lications sent to the country for distribution purposes and others carried by individuals. Often whole pages containing unacceptable or suspect stories and advertising are torn out, and the Economist, Newsweek, Time and others, including Arabic-language publica-tions which appear in London and are beholden to the House of Saud, have suffered this fate many times. If customs officials decide that it is too troublesome to tear out a story or a section, they ban the whole issue, and if the publication is accused of harbouring anti-House of Saud sentiments it is banned from entering the country. (At present the Independent and the Washington Post are among the publications which have been banned since the Gulf War.)

The issue of Newsweek which had a cover story on AIDS was banned; Time suffered the same fate for a story which mentioned the laziness of the king; Liberation of Paris was banned for carrying an interview with Yasser Arafat; the Economist made the mistake of titling an article 'Arab Lost Glory'; the Saudi-owned Al Hayat offered an innocent coverage of the PLO; and Robert Fisk of the Independent committed the biggest crime of them all: he wrote a detailed account of the death of the Iranian pilgrims during the Hajj in which he referred to the incompetence of the Saudi authorities.

Books suffer a worse fate and the punishment for smuggling a book is greater than that for smuggling hashish or cocaine. English-language books are suspect, mostly because the customs officers cannot read English. The 'degenerate' French stand no chance and books in other languages which are not understood are automatically banned. The carrying or importation of the Bible or Christian prayer books is subject to punishment which can be as severe as five years in prison. Judges never read the books they ban; after all, they are profane and some of them are the work of the devil.

Some visitors or returnees to Saudi Arabia who want to smuggle books in put them under an acceptable cover. Others have two copies of a book and use one to bribe the customs official. Some people with connections with the royal family use the offices of a prince to import whatever they need. One wealthy Saudi merchant had my book Payoff transmitted to him via a fax machine, made several copies of it and distributed it to friends. A single issue of Playboy, which is subject to a permanent ban, can fetch up to $100, and Playboy and Penthouse parties are given by people who have several issues of the precious publications.

Audio and video cassettes are subject to the same strictures as are applied to newspapers, magazines and books. But it is much easier to re-label them and more difficult to examine their contents. This is one of the reasons a 'cassette war' has begun in Saudi Arabia; cassettes which are carried or smuggled in are duplicated and distributed because this is easier than printing books, though lately books also have been copied and distributed in huge numbers. Also there are considerably more locally taped anti-House of Saud cassettes because it is easier to import blank cassettes than to import paper to print books.

Time and technology are working against the Saudi Govern-ment's attempt to restrict the exposure of their citizens to anything except the official line of the House of Saud. Although they still resort to jamming unfriendly radio and television stations, it is becoming more difficult to stop them altogether. Satellite transmission of television signals has become a problem for the authorities and during the Gulf War the Saudi people tuned in to CNN to learn what was happening. As I write, the Saudi Government is studying a proposal by Prince Salman, the head of the family council and also of propaganda, which would require the licensing of satellite dishes. Already members of CAVES have destroyed some of these. There are over four million television sets and, as elsewhere, more people watch them than read.

But people still read and, as with everything else, the House of Saud's attempt to control what its citizens read and write has met with resistance on all levels and is being undermined in ever more sophisticated ways. Against all odds and the risk of the death penalty, an underground press is at work in the country. Some publications come and go, but Rai Al Nas (Opinion of the People) and Rai Al Majid (Opinion of the Mosque) have appeared for some time and tens of thousands of copies are distributed, causing the House of Saud a lot of trouble. The hand-picked editors and writers of the officially approved press are showing signs of resenting their lowly status and the increasing restrictions on them in the face of a growing, palpable wish by the people to know more. More alarmingly for a country with a high level of illiteracy, the radios of friendly countries, the BBC and the Voice of America are carrying more and more news not to the liking of the House of Saud. At the same time the viewing of satellite television is increasing and watching CNN is becoming a craze ('I heard it on CNN,' the Saudis whisper to each other). Saudi opposition groups have found ways to distribute leaflets, pamphlets and booklets containing the true record of many events soon after they occur. The many Saudis who travel overseas carry back information which they spread through word of mouth. The mosques are increasingly used to spread news and views developed by the Islamic fundamentalist opposition and even the House of Saud cannot close them down.

The House of Saud's response to the need of the people for more freedom and more information has been greater suppression. In addition to the journalists already mentioned, Ahmad Mahmoud of Al Medina was fired for complaining about censorship; another journalist on that newspaper, Muhammad Salluheddine, was fired for saying George Bush lost the presidential election because he did not respond to the wishes of his people; the editor of Al Nadwa, Yussuf Hussein Hamanhouri, was relieved of his duties for writing an article about Islamic fundamentalism; the literary editor of Al Jazira was also fired for writing about banned books and so was the social editor of Al Riyadh, Fawzia Bakr. Poet Fatmeh Kamal Ahmad Yussuf was arrested and tortured for writing unauthorized poetry. Writers-poets Abdallah Sarh, Badr Shehadeh, Abdallah Al Shaikh, Ali Al Darroura, Ali Ibrahim Hussein, and Ahmad Muhammad Mtawea have been subjected to harassment, arrest and occasionally torture. During the Gulf War, intellectuals Aid Karmi, Salam Mahdi, Ali Kamal Awa, Taher Shamimi, Hassan Makki, Ja'afar Mubarark, Jawad Jathr and Abdeil Karim Hubeil were arrested along with several sheikhs who used mosques to disseminate information (Safr Hawil, Muhammad Masamin and Mansour Turki). Whatever literary establishment exists in Saudi Arabia was against the Gulf War and inviting foreign troops into their country.

The repression has also affected very many ordinary people. Some have been arrested and tortured for owning banned cassettes, reading banned books, walking the streets during prayer hours, listening to foreign broadcasts, mentioning Saddam Hussein, talking to foreign journalists, taking the name of God in vain and, naturally, for not affixing respectful titles when mentioning the name of the King. Many, including 17-year-old Abdel Karim Nima, have been tortured to death for owning a banned book.

If propaganda and the suppression of information do not work, and the lies of dictatorships have a way of eventually catching up with them, then the lack of intelligence behind the House of Saud's efforts will always lead to early exposure of their fabrications. On 6 January 1993 King Fahd himself released the figures of the country's budget for that year. According to him, the budget deficit for 1993 would be $8.5 billion. But a cursory examination of the budget figures shows that the country's income is to be based on an oil price of $21 per barrel. However, the price of oil has not been this high for some time and the real price is closer to $17 a barrel. His Majesty was overstating his country's income by 20 per cent. Fahd was afraid that revealing the true deficit would lead to questions about why the country is spending so much money on military hardware and even more serious ones about how long the country can continue to run huge deficits. As it is, the lie is so elementary that it was exposed by the Saudi opposition hours after the figures' release. Fahd is not only a cheat and a liar, but his attempt at deception did nothing but make more credible the opposition's calls for curtailment of the royal purse and the defence budget.

Lebanese President Charles Hellou looked at the assembled group of Beirut journalists and could not help but smile and greet them: 'Welcome to your second country.' It was 1966 and the President was making a point about how their first loyalty belonged to their financial backers, who were, with minor exceptions, from Saudi Arabia.

In 1992 the Guardian carried a story about the increasing Saudi control of the overseas Arab press by an obviously shocked Kathy Evans, who wrote: 'The Saudis continue to pump money in, viewing financial losses with indifference compared with the political benefits such influence yields.' The correspondent was referring to continued Saudi sponsorship of money-losing pan-Arab publications in London, Paris and Beirut.

The editor of the London-based daily Al Quds, Abdel Barn Attwan, is making a rare, brave stand against total Saudi hegemony over the pan-Arab press. He offers an accurate summation of the state of the Arab press: 'The Saudis have bought or are trying to buy up every single journalist, author or independent thinker in the Arab world.' But what Attwan forgot to mention is that 42 of the 48 Arabic-language newspapers, magazines and bulletins published in London have a Saudi financial connection which they use to buy Arab journalists and writers.

Journalists Suleiman Al Firzli and Farid Al Khatib, honourable men with established reputations, are blacklisted by the pro-Saudi pan-Arab press. They are having difficulty getting employment appropriate to their level of competence because there are very few independent pan-Arab journals left. The distinguished Palestinian writer Edward Said has been asked to discontinue his column in the Saudi-owned magazine Al Majallah. Edward Said is unreliable because he thinks for himself.

The Saudi answer to cries against stifling debate by monopolizing the Arab press outside their country is as crude as the rest of their policies. Retorts editor Othman Al Omeir of the Saudi-owned newspaper Sharq Al Awsat: 'It's our turn, it's the Saudi trend.'

There is little doubt that Al Omeir is right, but whether or not giving the pan-Arab press in Beirut, London, Paris, Athens and other places an exclusively Saudi point of view is desirable is another matter. His statement ignores the obvious dangers of a most serious development which is revealed as even more so by an examination of its origins and development.

By the late 1960s the Saudis' use of money to promote their policies throughout the Middle East had gone beyond buying journalists and publications to include influencing the Arab press indirectly as well. Saudi aid to Jordan, Lebanon and other countries implied an acceptance by these countries' governments of some unwritten conditions attached to it and one of them was to limit criticism of Saudi Arabia. This placed involuntary restrictions on the freedom of the press in other Arab countries and came close to rendering the bribing of newspapers unnecessary. Beirut, being freer than other places, had more to lose and in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were a number of occasions when the Lebanese Ministry of Information and the Prime Minister interceded with newspaper editors to get them to tone down their attacks on Saudi Arabia and to stop them carrying anti-Saudi news.

In 1971 a test of the Lebanese Government's resolve to eliminate attacks on Saudi Arabia developed when Ah Bailout, the editor of the Beirut weekly Al Distour, refused to heed his government's warnings and criticized King Faisal. In this case suspicion lurks that the Lebanese Government was exercising more than self-censorship and that Saudi Arabia asked it to silence him. Casting aside Lebanese neutrality and the traditional freedom of the press, Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam imprisoned Bailout for 17 days and released him only after the intercession of the Press Syndicate and the many Lebanese politicians who thought Salam had gone too far.

Because he was openly pro-Iraqi, Bailout's imprisonment was significant on another count: it also signalled that, officially to Arab countries, Saudi Arabia mattered more than the rest of the Arab world. Lebanese editors never forgot the incident and its results created a situation where praise of Saudi Arabia was possible but criticism of it was controlled. The Lebanese press was no longer free.

The death of Nasser and Faisal, along with the 1970s oil boom, made a bad situation much worse. The anti-Saudi press lost its magnet, while the pro-Saudi press lacked Faisal's deliberateness and clearness of direction and the sums of money available to bribe Arab journalists became extremely difficult to resist. Beirut's Al Tadamun, Al Distour, Kul Al Arab and Al Wattan tried to hold the line against the Saudi onslaught, but it was no use. Ghassan Zakkaria, the editor of the London-based weekly Sourakia, refers to this period as 'the time when Arab journalists started using oil instead of ink', and another Lebanese editor is more specifically damning when he states: 'Lebanese writers who work for the Wahhabi press descend to its level and do not elevate it, because it represents neither civilization, culture or free thought.'

The quality of writing in the Arab press declined and, coming on top of restrictions on content and the use of some talented journalists, meant that there was very little left of it that was worth reading. Those who could read foreign languages turned increasingly to English and French publications. The ridiculousness of the content of the pro-Saudi press is exemplified by the creation by a Lebanese weekly magazine's editor of a special column which reported nothing except the good deeds of the House of Saud. Others competed with him without formalizing their efforts. Writers spent too much time justifying themselves, talking about why they were pro-Saudi - a subconscious attempt to nullify their guilt.

But guilty they were and it showed in how they lived and the exaggerated way in which they continue to live. At present, I know of no fewer than 20 Arab journalists who receive money from the House of Saud and every one of them follows a lifestyle which normal journalism cannot provide. They wear expensive gold watches and diamond rings, own summer homes in the South of France and in Spain, run around in chauffeur-driven limousines, have maids and servants, and their wives are bedecked with jewellery and go shopping in designer dresses. They are mostly Lebanese and Palestinians who have become so preoccupied with money that they have not only lost all interest in Lebanon and Palestine, but also in their profession. A review of the film Love Story by a noted pro-Saudi Palestinian editor had the wrong names of the actor, actress and director and revealed that he had not seen the film; a supposedly original story about the American defence business was a literal lift from the Los Angeles Times; a writer rewrote five pages of my book Payoff without attribution; and some editors have hired writers and translators to do their work for them. Naturally, some of them write books about Fahd and his family which bear no relationship to the truth.

But the degeneracy of the pro-Saudi journalists does not stop at the quality of their professional output, for, to accommodate their masters, they have indulged in unquestionably shameful activities. Many journalists working for the House of Saud double as spies for Prince Turki bin Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, and spy on friends and colleagues. Others act as high-class procurers and the wives of some of them act as guides for the women of the House of Saud and, occasionally, teach them the flirtatious ways of the world.

In 1979 the creation of the Gulf Cooperation Council provided Saudi Arabia with another way to extend its influence over the Arab press. Suddenly, throughout the Gulf, there was a rash of newspaper and magazine closures and suspensions of publication. The Arab Times of the United Arab Republic was suspended several times because it carried stories not to the liking of the House of Saud. Al Tahia in Kuwait was forced out of business while Al Qabas and others suffered temporary suspensions. Kuwaiti writer Khaldoun Hassan Nakib was arrested for writing a magnificent book about Society in the Gulf. Naturally, Saudi pressure con-tinued to be exerted in different ways in different places and the Paris-based Al Distour has now joined the Saudi camp while the Egyptian Sawt Al Arab was forced to close down.

The GCC countries, however, went beyond imposing internal controls and espoused the censorship policies of Saudi Arabia towards writers and publications from other Arab countries and the rest of the world. This meant that a newspaper or a writer banned in Saudi Arabia is - most of the time - banned in all the GCC countries, and the same holds for cassettes, films, television programmes, actors and actresses, and painters. This application of weight culminated in a scandal which rocked the Egyptian media establishment and exposed the limitless ambitions of the House of Saud.

A GCC secret document leaked to the press in London listed 48 Egyptian writers, artists and actors and actresses whose works were to be banned - at the instigation of Saudi Arabia. Besides known journalists such as Muhammad Heikal, the list included the famous actresses Nur Al Sherrif and Nadia Lutfi. A GCC ban on any Arab artist would reduce their market and could put many of them out of business since it would be uneconomic to publish the books of banned writers or make films with banned actors and actresses. Although this case has caused a big stir, it is unlikely to be the last Saudi attempt to cow Arab writers and artists into submission.

As if these pressures were not enough, the House of Saud has also resorted to violence. We have seen how it kidnapped the Saudi writer Nasser Al Said from Beirut, but six years later the Saudis sponsored the assassination in Athens of the critical publisher of Al Nashua, Muhammad Mirri. A year later a Syrian journalist, who does not wish to be named, was attacked by Saudi-paid thugs while on holiday in Marbella and both his arms were broken. In 1991 the Saudis pressured Jordan into deporting politician and writer Muhammad Al Fassi. More recently, because the use of violence backfires through prompting wide press coverage, they have resorted to elaborate techniques to frighten their enemies.

Sourakia magazine, which appears weekly in London, specializes in scandals of people in high places; in a way it is the equivalent of America's Rampart or Britain's Private Eye. While it has switched sides and changed policies a number of times since it started nine years ago, it has never departed from a belief in closer cooperation among the Arab countries and has always championed the rights of the Palestinians. In 1992, in a strange move, it ran seven consecutive cover stories on the House of Saud and their misdeeds and there is no doubt as to the originality of the information the articles contained and that they showed a House of Saud in greater trouble than the outside world realizes.

The Saudi response to the Sourakia attacks was to try to undermine it; as usual, through the use of money. Beginning on 1 August 1992, a strange, costly series of happenings began plaguing Sourakia. An Arabic-language sheet called Al Maskhara (The Teaser) began circulating in London. Al Maskhara attacked Sourakia's editor Ghassan Zakkaria, his wife and his daughters, using the words 'liar', 'imposter', 'pimp', 'whore' and the like. Zakkaria contacted the police and his lawyer and it was determined that the magazine was printed in the United States and shipped to the UK through various means but that there was very little that could be done about it. In September 1992 there were two break-ins at the offices of Sourakia and the computer system and files were tampered with. Two months later advertisements began appearing in the International Herald Tribune asking people with information about the magazine to contact certain telephone and post-box numbers, and later it was discovered that the same advertisements had been turned down by several other newspapers. The material was traced to a security agency owned by Hambros Financial Services. Former and present employees of Sourakia were contacted and offered money by mysterious parties to provide financial information about the magazine and its editor. Counterfeit letters were written to the magazine's two banks, the Arab Bank and the Midland, asking for copies of statements and other information.

It is obvious that the anti-Sourakia effort had a great deal of money behind it and that its aim was to ruin the magazine financially, perhaps to intimidate its editor into stopping his attacks on the House of Saud or ceasing publication altogether. The finger points towards a Saudi businessman friend of the House of Saud. But, in the absence of written evidence linking the businessman with a specific activity, there is very little Zakkaria and Sourakia can do; and even if the evidence is there, they may not be in a position to afford a legal suit against an extremely wealthy man. Meanwhile the pressures on the magazine are so great and time-consuming that there is a good chance the Saudis will manage to put it out of business.

In a similar and so far smaller vein, the news that this book is being written (impossible to hide because of the number of people who were interviewed) has already provoked a campaign of vilification against me. Two Arab writers and a former columnist with a London weekly have been promoting two stories. The first is stupid enough to be discounted and it is an untrue accusation that I have been married seven times (in fact widowed once and divorced once). The second and more important accusation is that I am a Mossad agent determined to give the Arabs a bad name. And while the history of my family and our suffering and my own record stand solidly against it, some people who know neither have begun to repeat the story. But there is likely to be more trouble, and fairly solid inside information indicates that the Saudis are preparing a number of loyal journalists to attack the book when it is released, perhaps through writing reviews which pan it. While these attacks were taking place I was approached by a Lebanese journalist who told me that the Saudis might be interested in paying me to kill the book. If they ever make a real offer, I will take it, donate to charity and publish.

The creation of a favourable image in the West for the House of Saud began with Philby and his books and the process has never stopped. But Philby's reasons were complex ones of state and oriental romance, and though a liar who saw the Arab through colonial eyes, he was an educated man who wrote well. The Western writers who promote the House of Saud today have very few good attributes; their rottenness is due to financial motivation and they are a collection of semi-literate sycophants who take it upon themselves to distort and turn a blind eye to the truth. Through that they do the Saudi, Arab and Muslim peoples, and the West, a disservice, as well as contributing immeasurably to the disaster in the making.

In the 1950s American Minister to Saudi Arabia William Eddy wrote The Oil People, essentially a white man's view of simple, generous natives. CIA agent Kim Roosevelt wrote a book with the pompous title Arabs, Oil and History. Based on a two-month trip to the Middle East, it is full of superficial comment and reads like a book written about stupid people for stupid people. Again in the 1950s, Karl Twitchell, the first engineer sent by Charles Crane to look for oil, wrote a book and called it Saudi Arabia. The purpose was to tell people about a remote, romantic place but Twitchell's idea of what makes a just king fit to rule the Arabs consisted of a story about Ibn Saud visiting him while he had nothing on but a towel. H. C. Armstrong's Lord of Arabia followed in the late 1950s; it was nothing but a sophomoric presentation of the life of Ibn Saud, too saccharine for a five-year-old. In the 1960s Gerald de Gaury's Faisal was a study in hero worship; to him Faisal was the perfect Arab who never did wrong. In the early 1980s, Robert Lacey's The Kingdom and David Hol den's and Richard Johns's The House of Saud alluded to some royal shortcomings but, deliberately or otherwise, both books understated some important things and exaggerated others (Lacey is quite dismissive of the Death of a Princess episode and Fahd's gambling). They stopped short of asking the fundamental question of whether the Saudis, Arabs and Muslims deserve better than their Bedouin kings. Despite that, both books were banned in Saudi Arabia, since the House of Saud refuses to settle for less than total support.

Other books critical of the House of Saud appeared mostly in the 1980s, notably Arab Reach and The American House of Saud, but interestingly they attributed the House of Saud's misery and lack of character to their Arabness. They criticized the Arabs as a whole and used the House of Saud as a vehicle to do the job. And, of course, there were Sandra Mackey's The Saudis and Linda Blandford's The Oil Sheikhs, both popular, headline-grabbing efforts which one could reduce to 'let me tell you about the crazy people who have so much oil and money, the Arabs'.

With exceptions, and David Howarth's remarkable The Desert King is certainly one of them, the book treatment of Saudi Arabia can be reduced to two complex points. The House of Saud is the best thing for the Arabs because its members are good or it is bad because the Arabs are bad and deserve no better. So the Arabs suffer either way.

The original Western image of the House of Saud created by book authors was enhanced by press reporting in the late 1950s and 1960s. Beyond coverage of the Palestine problem, Western press interest in the Middle East coincided with Nasser's assumption of the popular leadership of the Arab world and his threat to Western interests. Oil, strategic considerations and Suez were what mattered and the House of Saud's enmity to Nasser guaranteed Saudi Arabia favourable press coverage. Again, I can find no substantial condemnation of the ways of the House of Saud; certainly little was said at that time about its governance, or about manifestations of backwardness such as the money its members squander. Public beheadings, floggings, the abuse of women and atrocious personal behaviour were presented as an Arab rather than a House of Saud activity. Even political executions were given an Arab label and I recall the New York Herald Tribune correspondent Joe Alex Morris, Jr. asking in 1959:

'Is it different from anywhere else in the Middle East?'

When the Time correspondent John Mecklin broke rank and wrote an article criticizing King Faisal (when he was Crown Prince and Prime Minister), his Chief of Correspondents cabled him back asking him whether he 'knew what the hell he was doing'. Overall, the Western press overlooked the atrocity of the House of Saud because they were 'on our side'.

In the 1970s the press busied itself with writing about Saudi wealth and how it was being used. In 1975 the stodgy New York Times ran 25 stories on Adnan Khashoggi, the man who epito-mized Saudi wealth to the world. There were occasional mentions of what effect such wealth was having on the country's social cohe-sion, but most of the articles settled for considerably less. In fact, much more was written about Fahd's gambling and womanizing than about the social destructiveness enveloping the country and considerably more about how the Saudis squandered money chas-ing blondes overseas than about what was happening inside the country - even the various attempts to overthrow the Government.

In examining nearly 30,000 pages of 1970s Western reporting about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, I found 20 times more mentions of the number of the King's wives than of the level of literacy in the country, and precious little was written about the killer diseases which could have been cured by diverting a small proportion of the House of Saud's income to fight them. Even the most serious development of them all, promoting Islam at the expense of Arabism, escaped press scrutiny and the danger of the Islamic movement, apparent to knowledgeable Arabs, who warned against it incessantly, was overlooked. (Because it only covers important international happenings, television is a better yardstick. In 1976 American television devoted nine minutes to Saudi Arabia, one third the time it gave Albania.)

Of course the oil embargo was extremely unpopular with the Western press; but instead of examining its basic purpose and what led to it, what the press objected to was Arab control of the precious commodity. This added to the picture of the Arabs being bad people who do not know how to behave; after 1973 they were bad people who were dangerous. In the ensuing reporting of OPEC, the membership of Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela and smaller non-Arab producers were all but forgotten and it was the Arabs who got the blame for price increases even on occasions when the instigators were outsiders.

By the 1980s the House of Saud, though it had escaped serious Western press criticism for decades, was no longer content to depend on the inherently friendly attitude towards it and decided to try to manipulate Western news coverage of Saudi Arabia and outside events with some bearing on it. Dictatorships do not take chances with how they are presented and are intolerant of criticism. However, the Saudi dictatorship is less tolerant than most and believes the use of money can cure all problems, including that of image.

Whether the attempt to manipulate the Western press was planned or simply the expression of a general attitude is impossible to know, but there is no doubt that it had a pattern to it. The efforts of individual princes to try to bribe Western journalists may not have been approved by the King personally, but they were undertaken to please him, and wealthy Saudi merchants prodded their Western business associates to influence Western media for the same reason.

The Saudis' effort to control Western press coverage of their country began simply. They rarely issued visas to foreign cor-respondents to visit the country and when they did it always took a long time during which they tried to discover whether the visiting correspondent was well disposed towards them. They favoured their 'friends', journalists who appreciated the advantage a Saudi visa gave them over suspect colleagues, and except on rare occasions, these 'friends' returned the favour by overlooking many small stories, thereby protecting their ability to visit Saudi Arabia again.

Interviews with the King and his brothers were arranged accord-ing to a stricter rule - the interview rather than its content was the event worth reporting. Those so favoured devoted most of their allotted space to writing about how the interview was arranged, the diwan and the King's sense of humour, and departed with presents of solid-gold incense burners studded with precious stones. Again correspondents sought to maintain their favoured positions; there were no hard questions about policies, and discussing personal things like gambling and womanizing was out of the question. Saudi Oil Minister Yamani was a master manipulator of this patronage system, knowing exactly whom to see and in what circumstances, and during the heyday of OPEC maintaining a good relationship with Yamani mattered to journalists more than writing stories about his unpopularity with fellow OPEC members or the occasional anti-House of Saud story.

The Saudi patronage system still differs from what normally exists in other countries. In this case it meant more than simple favouritism; it meant not being able to cover Saudi Arabia or OPEC from within. If we accept that covering the Middle East requires an ability to cover Saudi Arabia and OPEC, what we have is a situation where a journalist could not cover the Middle East unless he or she was on the good side of the House of Saud. To get a true picture, one has to imagine the President of the USA ordering unfriendly journalists not to attend his press conferences.

The combination of patronage and censorship satisfied the Saudis' ability to influence what was said about them; but, as with what happened to the Arab press, what they wanted was promoters of their ideas and their deputy-sheriff position. This is when the House of Saud began using the other powers at its disposal: the application of financial pressure on some journalistic establishments, the purchase of Western media and outright sponsorship or bribery of writers and journalists.

Applying financial pressure came easily to the House of Saud. The Government had experience in using money to dictate to the country's press as well as the pan-Arab press in Beirut, London, Paris and other places. In the case of the Western press, the Saudis are in a position to have a publication banned from all the GCC member countries. Because these countries represent good markets, all the news agencies, picture agencies and syndicated services are vulnerable and must take the Saudi capability into consideration.

As I write, the syndication service of the Observer in London is not carried by a single Saudi-controlled publication. The Observer is loath to reveal the cost of this boycott, but it is substantial and it had to decide whether its various reports about the Yamama 2 arms programme were 'worth it'. Recently the Washington Post, without official notification from Saudi Arabia, began suffering the same fate because Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Caryle Murphey wrote a number of articles not to the liking of the Saudi royals. The Post too is sticking to its guns. But the great majority of news and syndication services are guilty by omission; they do not issue directives against criticizing Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud to their correspondents, but the consequences of angering the House of Saud are taken into consideration by both management and the field reporters. This amounts to de facto self-censorship.

Perhaps the best way to assess this elusive area (people refuse to talk about it) is to examine the supplements about Saudi Arabia which appear in publications such as the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune and The Times. Supplements are by definition special reports and contain a considerable amount of advertising by Saudi companies and outside companies which do business in Saudi Arabia. There is no way to get companies to advertise in a supplement which is severely critical of the country. So publications carry supplements knowing that they will carry news favourable to Saudi Arabia and of the eight supplements I have managed to examine none has reported the situation of the country accurately and, for the most part, they concentrate on noting the achievements of its government.

Even non-supplement regular advertising influences the editorial content of Western newspapers. Makers of expensive watches and jewelry are not likely to advertise in some editions of Time, Newsweek, the Economist and the International Herald Tribune if these publications are banned from the GCC countries because of their editorial content. The people of the oil-rich GCC countries buy a disproportionately greater number of these products per capita than any region in the world.

But neutralizing criticism is only a first step towards controlling positive reporting. To generate positive reporting, the Saudis began trying to buy Western newspapers, magazines and radio and TV stations. This new development began when Saudi interests unsuccessfully tried to buy into London's Channel 4 in the early 1980s. In 1986, the Saudi businessman Wafiq Al Said, a close friend of King Fahd and Prince Sultan and a man of consider-able influence who, according to Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman, swung the massive Yamama 2 arms deal in favour of Britain, bought 35 per cent of London's Sunday Correspondent. The paper is now defunct and there is no evidence that Said issued direct orders against anything, but it would have been difficult for its journalists to cover the Yamama 2 deal adequately. Saudi businessman Sulayman Olayan is his own man and he owns S per cent of the shares of the Independent and the Sunday Independent. So far, the papers have shown no sign of being influenced by this, but what would happen if Olayan bought more shares in the financially unsteady company is anybody's guess.

The purchase in 1992 of the loss-making United Press Inter-national by Middle East Broadcasting of London, the television company run by King Fahd's in-law, the 31-year-old Walid Ibrahim, is the most blatant example of the Saudi attempt to buy into Western media for propaganda rather than sound business purposes. It was followed by an offer by Prince Khalid bin Sultan to buy the Observer, the newspaper which did most to expose the corrupt nature of the Yamama 2 deal, in which Khalid's father, the Saudi Minister of Defence, is involved.

Certainly the most serious development in the Saudis' attempt to pervert Western press reporting of the Middle East is their ability to bribe Western journalists and writers. In this regard, they have been most successful in London. I have ascertained that six well-known journalists who write about the Middle East for major London publications are either directly or indirectly in the pay of the Saudi Embassy. By this I mean people who receive checks and have direct involvement in Saudi business, rather than those who accept free trips to the country or expensive gold watches. Not only have I seen, though I was not permitted to copy it, an official list of the payments to some of them, but they show no sign of wishing to conceal their Saudi involvement. It is another case of Saudi corruption becoming an accepted facet of Western life.

Recently the Sunday Times correspondent Marie Calvin was invited to an official lunch with the Saudi Ambassador to the UK. The invitation was issued by a well-known writer on Middle East affairs. When Marie was late responding because she was in Baghdad, a follow-up telephone call came from a regular contributor on Middle East affairs to a respectable national daily. Marie's reaction summed up the ugly situation: 'What the hell is going on here? I thought those guys were writers and journalists and they're acting like the Ambassador's office boys.'

The incident which demonstrates what is at stake more than any other was the reported $5-million offer to American journalist Charles Glass to write a biography of Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the commander of the Arab forces during the Gulf War. Glass thought the whole thing was a joke and turned down Prince Khalid's emissaries, but he made the mistake of talking about it to columnist Alexander Walker, who reported it. A week after Walker's report appeared, Glass received from a well-known British journalist an angry letter which objected to his indiscretion. It was a case of another Middle East expert having been hired to write the biography Glass had honourably turned down. But when a surprised Glass telephoned the writer of the letter and asked him about this, the man insisted that he was writing a book about the Arab commanders of the Gulf War. Glass, who had covered the war, had a difficult time remembering who they were.

Despite the Saudi purchase of United Press International, buying American media and journalists has proven more difficult than doing it in London. The American public would never stand for it and it goes more against the grain than in a colonial country with a long history of accepting the corruption of outsiders. But the Saudis may achieve their aim indirectly, for lately defence contractors who supply Saudi Arabia with hardware have objected to some stories about the waste of it all and, along with some oil companies, two are considering cancelling advertising in publications which criti-cize the Saudi defence policy. Another form of indirect influence, something resembling lobbying, is acceptable and in the United States the Saudis have followed this indirect route.

A brief list of people with business connections with Saudi Arabia reveals the names of former Directors of the CIA John McCone, William Colby and Richard Helms; former American Ambassadors to various Middle East countries Andrew Kilgore, Parker Hunt, Talcot Seelye and Harold Cutler; former Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew and Edmund Muskie; former senator James Abu Rizk; and dozens of lesser-known names. If not all of them, many of those people have spoken and written favourably about the House of Saud. Former CIA agent Miles Copeland devised a scheme which made Birmingham, Alabama and Jeddah sister cities, and in no time at all corporations located in Alabama were promised huge export orders and began singing the praises of the House of Saud.

In addition to hundreds of individuals and corporations who promote the Saudi image, universities and study centres have not proved immune to the influence of Saudi money. The University of Southern California, Duke University, Georgetown University and the Aspen Institute have accepted Saudi grants which implied non-criticism of the House of Saud. Many Middle East experts at American universities work in departments which are funded by the Saudis and during the Gulf War many of them were interviewed by the BBC, NBC, ABC and CBS and newspapers and magazines and proffered opinion favourable to the House of Saud or uncritical of it.

In summary, what we have is a situation where the Western press's ability to report on Saudi Arabia is hampered by the House of Saud's power to control journalists' entry into the country, and by the application of indirect financial pressure on journalistic establishments. On top of that, reporting which supports and approves the House of Saud is facilitated through the Saudis' ability to buy into Western media, bribe journalists and exploit their business and academic contacts.