Leading member of the Saudi Arabian royal family who as Minister of Defence amassed a fortune from commissions on arms deals
Crown Prince Sultan was a key figure in the politics and government of Saudi Arabia over the course of nearly six decades. He was Minister of Defence in the royal government for almost half a century from his appointment to the post in 1962. Sultan was a full brother of the late King Fahd — they were two of the seven male offspring of Hassa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi, the most prolific and reportedly the favourite wife of Ibn Saud, founder of the modern kingdom. The brothers, who were collectively known as the “Sudairi Seven”, were the single most powerful group within the extensive royal family and at the heart of decision-making during Saudi Arabia’s oil-funded transformation in the second half of the 20th century.
Sultan was a strong, some would say headstrong, character. He had a reputation for being hard working, certainly compared to most of his brothers. This earned him the nickname of “Bulbul” (nightingale) on account of his willingness to burn the midnight oil. But his dedication to work was matched by a capacity for personal enjoyment. Even among the famously sexually active Saudi princes, Sultan was known for his “vigour on the couch”. He was equally renowned for his generosity with and love of money. He profited lavishly from the kingdom’s finances, a large proportion of which was given to his defence department. Much of his vast personal wealth was built on the huge commissions he recouped from government arms purchases, most notably the al-Yamamah deals with BAE Systems dating from the 1980s.
He was long an advocate of close ties with the United States, despite tensions in the relationship after the September 11 attacks in the US which were mainly carried out by Saudi nationals. These strains were subsequently made worse by Sultan’s refusal to allow the US to use Saudi bases to stage military strikes on Afghanistan. However, it emerged after the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003 that the kingdom had then allowed allied forces to operate from at least three air bases within its borders and provided cheap fuel. One of Sultan’s sons, Prince Bandar, served as Saudi Ambassador to Washington for two decades until 2005.
Sultan’s leading role in ostensibly humanitarian and charitable work also caused difficulties in his personal relationship with the US. As Crown Prince, he was chairman of the Higher Council for Islamic Affairs which provided funds for Muslim communities around the world. Because of his role, Sultan’s name was linked to reports that some Saudi money had been dispensed to Islamic “charities” with links to terrorist groups — allegations he was compelled to deny strongly.
Officially, Sultan was born in Riyadh, the future capital of Saudi Arabia, in December 1930, although accurate records were not kept at the time and several reports suggest his birth was a few years earlier. Either way, this was a decade in which his father, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, was in the process of creating the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which would be declared in 1932. Ibn Saud had crucially taken control of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s and declared himself King of the Hijaz in the Grand Mosque of Mecca. Sultan was the 15th son born to Ibn Saud, but his father’s preference for his mother among all of his wives gave him special status.
Sultan received a traditional education along with his brothers in his father’s court. He made his first major public appearance in 1947 when he was named Governor of Riyadh. By this time, great changes were already afoot: oil had been discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938 and production begun under the US-controlled Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company). Just before his death in 1953, Ibn Saud created three new departments of state, with Sultan appointed Minister of Agriculture. He immediately established a reputation for industry and pugnacity, but was said to lack the subtlety of his elder brother, Fahd. Two years later, Sultan became Communications Minister.
Ibn Saud had been succeeded by Crown Prince Saud despite the widespread view within the royal family that his brother, Feisal — who now became Crown Prince — was far better suited to the role of monarch. As the 1950s went on, Saud’s financial mismanagement and inept conduct of foreign policy meant that he was gradually forced to hand de facto power to Feisal. Sultan was a prominent supporter of Feisal, who eventually became king in name as well as in practice when Saud was forced to abdicate in 1964. By this time, Sultan — seen as a progressive and a moderniser — had already taken over the defence ministry which would become his fiefdom.
As Defence Minister, Sultan was closely involved with the development and expansion of the Saudi national airline, Saudia, and the construction of the rail link between Dammam on the Gulf coast and Riyadh. But it was the modernisation of the Armed Forces which was his central preoccupation. Sultan was able to exploit the royal family’s fears of plots by their Nasserite and Baathist enemies in the Arab world to push through a vast expansion of the army and the rapid development of the air force. The Armed Forces’ need for weaponry turned Saudi Arabia, almost overnight, into one of the world’s largest arms procurers. From the outset, any deal was accompanied by an enormous commission for Sultan. By the mid-1970s, and especially after a huge increase in military deals with the US and France after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Sultan’s wealth was reckoned to be colossal.
Even before King Feisal’s assassination by a nephew in 1975, Fahd and Sultan were, in effect, running the kingdom. Feisal’s replacement by the weak and ineffectual Khaled did not change this situation. Sultan was then reported to have ambitions to become, after Fahd, the next in line to the throne. But other members of the family were wary of the ambitions of the “Sudairi clan” and ensured that Prince Abdullah was confirmed as second-in-line by being appointed Second Deputy Prime Minister. Sultan also made no progress in achieving what was regarded as his long-held ambition to absorb the National Guard, which was controlled by Abdullah, into his defence forces. The Guard was a 35,000-strong body responsible for internal security. Sultan argued that it made economic sense to merge the two, but many within the royal family saw the National Guard as a counterweight to the Armed Forces and an insurance policy against internal coups.
Sultan suffered a further setback when Iranian-inspired religious extremists seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979. With Fahd and Abdullah both conveniently absent abroad it fell to Sultan to deal with the crisis. He decided to launch a mass attack on the insurgents after ten days amid much bloodshed. The incident severely damaged the prestige of the House of Saud but also of Sultan, whom many Muslims blamed for having failed to protect one of their holiest places. When Fahd duly became king on Khaled’s death in 1982, Abdullah was confirmed as the Crown Prince. Sultan became the new Second Deputy Prime Minister, second-in-line to the throne.
Despite these reverses, Sultan remained close to Fahd, the new king. Certainly he gave no indication to foreign officials that his wings had been clipped. British diplomats who had dealings with him in the 1980s spoke of him as “imperious, inflexible and driving a hard bargain”. They also noted they he spoke freely and authoritatively (though not always coherently) on all areas of foreign policy. What remained clear was that Sultan, through his key intermediary, Adnan Khashoggi, was the man whose agreement was vital to any lucrative arms deals.
Sultan was intimately involved in the negotiation of a series of record arms sales by Britain to Saudi Arabia since the mid-1980s known as the al-Yamamah deals, in which the prime contractor was BAE Systems and its predecessor, British Aerospace. Sultan’s signature was on the original agreement of 1985 and Whitehall documents show that the price of the warplanes sold was inflated by a third, a deal that would allow “commissions” worth £600 million to be skimmed off the top and paid to Saudi officials.
Sultan’s record of arms purchases was put to the test when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait led to the Gulf War at the end of 1990. After asking the US to intervene, Saudi Arabia was involved in air attacks on Iraq and in the land operation which liberated Kuwait. It was another of Sultan’s sons, Prince Khalid Ibn Sultan, who led the Arab-Islamic forces during the conflict. This was the high point of Sultan’s own relations with Washington, which were to deteriorate in the face of al-Qaeda’s attacks, the kingdom’s reluctance to join in the US “war on terror” and the continuing bad publicity over arms sales.
A stroke suffered by King Fahd meant that from 1995 Abdullah took over much of the day-to-day running of the kingdom before succeeding his brother ten years later. Sultan then became Crown Prince but relations with Abdullah remained difficult. Abdullah, devout, conservative and with simple Beduin tastes, was not from the Sudairi clan and was a very different character to Sultan. By the time Abdullah became king in 2005 both men were already in their eighties. Neither was in good health. Sultan was reported to be suffering from cancer of the colon. In 2009 Sultan’s illness led King Abdullah to name Prince Nayef, another of the Sudairi Seven, as his Second Deputy Prime Minister. Sultan travelled to New York in June this year to receive treatment. A statement issued by the Saudi royal court said he had died “outside the kingdom” from his illness.
Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, Saudi Crown Prince, was born in December 1930. He died on October 22, 2011, aged 80
>Colonel Muammar Gaddafi
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Muammar Qaddafi relaxes at a fortified house in the Syrtes Desert, in 1973.
Brutal and unpredictable Libyan leader whose regime ended in bloody civil war after 42 years in power during which he had squandered his country’s oil revenues on weaponry, international terrorism and grandiose projects
The violent death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi brought to an end a cruel and destructive regime that had lasted 42 years. In the course of his long tyranny the eccentric, narcissistic and murderously unpredictable Libyan leader had not only ruthlessly oppressed his own people but had also become a dangerous sponsor of violent instability around the world. For many years, until the title was appropriated by Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Gaddafi was public enemy number one for the US Government and its allies. “The mad dog of the Middle East” was how President Reagan described the self-appointed colonel when unleashing air strikes against Libya in the 1980s.
Extremist groups ranging from the Basque separatists ETA, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the terrorists Abu Nidal and Carlos were funded by Gaddafi, who also shipped tonnes of weapons and Czech Semtex to the IRA. In his role as godfather of terrorism, he sent his hit teams ranging round the world to eliminate Libyan exile “stray dogs” who dared to oppose his dictatorship.
His open espousal of “revolutionary violence” reached new intensity in the mid-1980s with evidence of Libyan links with massacres at Rome and Vienna airports, and the bombing of a Berlin night club frequented by US servicemen. At the same time Western intelligence was acquiring details of the vast underground chemical weapons plant that Gaddafi had built beneath the Libyan desert. In 1986 the US sent aircraft from its carriers in the Mediterranean and air bases in Britain to attack targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. Gaddafi, sleeping in a tent in his garden, survived, although his adopted daughter was killed in the raids.
In Britain Gaddafi’s reputation had plunged to its nadir with the killing of a London policewoman, WPC Yvonne Fletcher, by a shot fired from within the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square in April 1984. Two years later came Gaddafi’s most spectacular outrage to that date. In 1988 a bomb placed on board a PanAm airliner, Flight 103, detonated in flight in UK airspace, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members, as well as 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, where many large fragments of the aircraft came down. Suspicions of Libya’s involvement in the outrage and Gaddafi’s refusal to hand over two Libyan suspects resulted in severe UN sanctions against Libya.
After that Gaddafi appeared to back away from his sponsorship of international terrorism. He admitted to supplying the IRA with weapons, and even provided Britain with information about terrorists. He further conceded that his links with the IRA had damaged Libya.
At home, for the Libyan people Gaddafi’s rule from the time he seized control in a military coup on September l, 1969, had been a grim experience. With a population of little more than two million and oil revenues of billions of dollars a year, there was no reason why Libya should not have have been among the world’s most prosperous nations.
But Gaddafi’s ambition after the death of Egypt’s President Nasser to become the leader of the Arab world and the Maghreb took his country down a disastrous path. Most of Libya’s oil revenues were squandered on grandiose and unrealistic economic and military plans, and on foreign adventures.
Vast quantities of arms were bought from the Soviet Union, and at one stage there were some 8,000 Soviet technicians and military advisers in the country. When they finally departed they left behind large numbers of tanks and squadrons of aircraft which were abandoned to rust in the desert.
Libyans found less and less in the shops while also enduring a steep rise in unemployment and increasing repression as a result of sporadic attempts to overthrow the regime. UN sanctions in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing included a ban on flights to and from the country, hastening the nation’s economic decline.
After the PanAm bombing US suspicions had first concentrated on Iran and Syria as the chief culprits. The US Navy had earlier mistakenly shot down an Iranian civil airliner, and this was viewed as the likely motive for Lockerbie. But with the emergence of two Libyan agents, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, as suspects in the bombing, suspicion fell squarely on Libya.
In November 1991 both men were indicted by the US Attorney General and the Scottish Lord Advocate for the bombing of PanAm Flight 103. Libya refused to extradite them, and it was a further eight years before a compromise was agreed for a trial to be held in the Netherlands under Scottish law. In January 2001 al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served in a Scottish jail. Fhimah was acquitted and returned to Libya.
In spite of his previous defiance this appeared to have a profound effect on Gaddafi. Possibly intimidated by the US invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he suddenly agreed not to proceed with a programme aimed at developing weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, in 2003 he formally accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing.
These two concessions resulted in the end of Libya’s diplomatic isolation and the wide-ranging UN sanctions against the country. It also led to the re-establishment in 2006 of US-Libyan diplomatic relations.
In September 2009 Gaddafi staged his re-entry on to the world stage with a maiden address to the UN General Assembly. In a rambling discourse that that lasted for an hour and 36 minutes, he merely confirmed his reputation for eccentricity and unpredictability. He described the Security Council as the “Terror Council”, ostentatiously tore up his copy of the UN rule book and then unexpectedly praised Barack Obama, stating that he would be happy if Obama “stayed President of America for ever”.
The previous month the Scottish Executive had released al-Megrahi from prison on health grounds, an event that outraged public and official opinion in the US. The White House described al-Megrahi’s triumphal arrival at Tripoli airport, where he was welcomed by a large crowd, as “outrageous and disgusting”.
The episode damaged relations between Britain and the US, although the UK Government insisted that the decision to free al-Megrahi had been taken unilaterally by the Scottish Government. However, the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, afterwards acknowledged that British interests, including those of UK nationals, British businesses and possibly security co-operation would have been damaged had the Lockerbie bomber been allowed to die in jail.
In the autumn of his leadership Gaddafi’s international comeback had coincided with a sharp rise in the price of oil, which led many nations of the world to compete for his favours. But although Libya was publicly accepted back into the international community, Gaddafi was too unbalanced and unpredictable to be trusted. His sanctioning of the torture of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been accused of infecting Libyan children with HIV outraged Europe and the US. Meanwhile, he had done nothing to mitigate his oppression of his citizens. And when international inspectors were finally permitted to visit Libya in 2003 they discovered several tonnes of chemical weaponry as well as an active nuclear weapons programme. However, in addition to accepting Libyan responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, Gaddafi did agree to pay compensation of up to $10 million each to the families of the victims.
Muammar al-Gaddafi was born in June 1942 in the Libyan desert, not far from Sirte on the Libyan coast, the son of a Beduin shepherd. He frequently referred to his rough nomadic background and when in power took pleasure in receiving guests in a tent pitched inside an army compound.
In 1963 he entered the Libyan military academy, was commissioned and spent a brief period at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Along with a group of young fellow officers he formed a secret revolutionary committee. In 1969, as a Signals captain, he led a bloodless coup against the Libyan monarch, deposing the elderly King Idris I who was on a visit to Turkey.
Motivated by a hatred for the West and its backing for Israel, Gaddafi closed British and American military bases in Libya and established himself as Libya’s commander in chief and Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Blending Arab nationalism, revolutionary socialism and Islamic orthodoxy, he proceeded to run Libya as a stridently anti-Western dictatorship.
The property of Libya’s Italian and Jewish populations was confiscated. The ancient sharia penalty of cutting off the hands of thieves was reinstituted, and Tripoli’s chief Christian church was transformed into a mosque. Gaddafi appeared to take particular satisfaction in infuriating the US, and relations reached a new low in 1979 when a Gaddafi-inspired mob burned down the US embassy in Tripoli. At one stage he was involved in a project to create an “Islamic bomb” and called on all means, including the nuclear threat, to force Israel out of Palestine.
Extreme vanity and fanaticism, together with unpredictablity, charm and good looks, proved a dangerous mixture for his nation. He was eccentric, perhaps not a little mad, but possessed the cunning and ruthlessness which outsmarted his many enemies and kept him in power longer than most of the other rulers in the region.
His youthful idol was Egypt’s President Nasser whose Arab nationalism he sought to emulate when he seized power. His first big quest was to unite Libya with Egypt, combining Libya’s new-found oil wealth with Egypt’s more skilled and educated population. But the naive Libyan upstart and his youthful followers who surged over the Egyptian borders demanding instant unity aroused suspicion and unease in Cairo. Within a year Nasser was dead, and Gaddafi appointed himself the “custodian of Arabism” in his place.
Libyan-Egyptian relations later deteriorated so badly that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt became Gaddafi’s mortal enemy. A state of border warfare resulted, and at one stage Egypt considered invading Libya.
Gaddafi’s pan-Arab ambitions in the Middle East and African were all frustrated as well as other unionist experiments and foreign expeditions. He joined an unsuccessful and loose alliance with Egypt and Syria and became a leading supporter of Uganda’s tyrant, President Idi Amin.
Increasingly, however, he turned to his own unfortunate nation to try out his political and social experiments. The principles on which the new Libyan state was to be founded were enunciated in Gaddafi’s so-called Green Book. According to his Third Universal Theory, capitalism was a Western system of exploitation alien to the Muslim world, while Communism was equally unacceptable because of its materialism and atheism. Gaddafi therefore put forward a third political system, the Jamahiriya, or republic, based on the “state of the masses”.
This was to be the most advanced form of government known to mankind and his “solution to the political problem”. Through “committees everywhere” his system would end all conventional forms of government — family, tribal, parliamentary — and replace them with “direct democracy” and “people’s power”.
Under this version of Islamic socialism, all government would disappear, together with the apparatus of the state, such as the police, the armed forces and even commerce. The revolutionary committees would “incite the masses” to overthrow conventional authority in a sort of Libyan Cultural Revolution. Libyan diplomats were sacked and Libyan embassies in foreign capitals were replaced by “people’s bureaux”.
Needless to say, the precepts of the Green Book bore no resemblance to the Libya that Gaddafi fashioned and ruled. Far from destroying centralised power, he ruled as a dictator with a handful of close associates and with the armed forces and the security services as his power base.
His style of government was arbitrary and eccentric, with officials or journalists often summoned to listen to long rambling discourses from their leader at any hour of the day or night. The ensuing lack of cohesion, and sudden changes of course, had a disastrous effect on the country’s economy, and he squandered his huge oil revenues without any thought for the future.
Grandiose and unrealistic five-year plans repeatedly foundered for lack of technology and skills and common sense. Resources were wasted on vast prestige projects, rather than industries likely to broaden Libya’s industrial base or meet consumer needs.
Internal discontent was largely contained because the police and the army — far from being abolished — were instruments of Gaddafi’s personal dictatorship and, together with the all-pervasive security police, formed a network of intimidation. Gaddafi presided over this frightened nation not as President or head of state but simply as “Leader of the Revolution”.
From the handsome young desert warrior of the 1970s Gaddafi gradually took on the somewhat grotesque appearance of an aging rock star, changing frequently through the day from Beduin robes to bizarre comic-opera uniforms. The atmosphere of Ruritania which surrounded him was completed by the presence of his bodyguard — a group of armed, buxom women in combat uniform pledged to sacrifice their lives for their leader. This Amazonian guard sparked an international incident in 2006 when he landed in Nigeria with more than 200 fierce armed women for a summit conference, and this retinue was refused entry by the Nigerians.
His greatest challenges came from half a dozen militant Islamic groups more extreme and fundamentalist than his own regime. Disaffection among some of his leading supporters, not least in the armed forces, resulted in many attempted coups and efforts to kill him. One of the most serious uprisings against him was in October 1993 with a rebellion of 2,000 troops from five military bases. About 300 were reported to have been killed in the fighting. In March 1996 he sent helicopter gunships and troops to Benghazi to crush a fundamentalist uprising, and in the same year 50 people were killed when his security forces gunned down spectators chanting anti-Gaddafi slogans at a football stadium.
In 1998 Gaddafi backed claims by a former British Intelligence officer, David Shayler, that the British Government had supported an attempt to assassinate the Libyan leader with a bomb in 1996. The British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook dismissed this claim as “pure fantasy”.
Failing to impose his egocentric vision on the Arab World, he turned his attention to Africa. Libya’s intervention in Uganda backfired and the ineptitude of the operation caused discontent among his officers. Some 4,000 Libyan troops were killed in Chad. Gaddafi bitterly opposed the Middle East peace process, giving his support to the most violent Palestinian guerrilla organisations, and rejecting any negotiations with Israel.
In September 1995, after the autonomy accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel, he showed his scorn for the deal by expelling thousands of Palestinians.
In March 2004 the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair became one of the first Western leaders in decades to visit Libya and to meet Gaddafi. Praising the Libyan leader’s change of heart he said that Libya could now be a strong ally in the international war on terrorism. Those hopes were not certainly fulfilled; in his latter years Gaddafi seemed to concentrate more effort on the problems of staying in power, and staying alive, than in trying to change the world.
Indeed, when eventually the spirit of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt began to infect the people of Libya, too, the apparatus of security and repression that Gaddafi had so carefully constructed and nurtured over more than 40 years, was in the end powerless to save him against the rapidly gathering strength of the demonstrators.
Within a month of the first major political protests, on February 17, 2011, a National Transitional Council had been established on March 23, with Mahmoud Jibril as Chairman of its Executive Board — effectively recognised in most quarters as Libya’s interim Prime Minister.
However, Gaddafi fought back, ruthlessly deploying his country’s armed forces against its citizens. His use of heavy weaponry against the population made him the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, accusing him of crimes against humanity.
It also prompted the intervention of the Nato powers which, with the support of the Arab League, enforced a no-fly zone over Libya and began air strikes against Gaddafi’s armour, artillery and his military command and control facilities.
For some months it seemed that, even hampered by Nato air strikes against his forces, Gaddafi might, with the considerable military resources at his disposal, be able to outface an ill-armed and chaotically led revolution. At one time his forces seemed to be within a whisker of retaking the city of Benghazi. It was not to be.
The sudden entry of rebel forces into Tripoli in the second half of August 2011 appeared to confirm the final evaporation of Gaddafi’s power and to be a defining moment in the end of his brutal and quixotic political career. His compound was captured by rebels — by then acknowledged in the West as Libya’s legitimate government — who entered the capital’s Green Square, tearing down posters of the erstwhile leader and erecting the flags of the rebellion.
Yet he still eluded capture. Contradictory reports suggested that the government of Niger might harbour him, or that he had fled to Zimbabwe. Yet he still maintained a media presence, giving radio addresses continuing to assert his power and calling on his supporters to crush the rebels.
Meanwhile, as the rebel forces advanced, the secrets of the way the Libyan leader had lived began to surface. Within his quarters, among artefacts suggesting a life of luxury lived by Gaddafi and his family was a notably grotesque solid-gold mermaid sofa. An underground chamber beneath Tripoli University was revealed to contain a luxurious bedroom, whirlpool bath and operating theatre to which only Gaddafi and his associates had had access.
When Gaddafi’s stronghold of Bab-al-Azizya was captured by the rebel forces, evidence of his oft-repeated whimsical affection for the former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was found in the discovery of an album with pages of pictures of her.
Despite Gaddafi’s disappearance, in subsequent weeks forces loyal to him continued to offer stout resistance in spite of the degradation of their materiel by Nato air attacks, and pressure on the ground from opposition forces which, though still often somewhat inconsistent in their approach to warfare, daily grew in strength, and in the quality of their weapons.
Yet he continued to elude capture in a febrile atmosphere in which regular reports were aired either of his death, or those of various members of his family. Eventually it was to be his home town of Sirte that yielded the secret of former Libyan leader’s whereabouts.
On October 20 a senior official of the National Transitional Council reported that he had been captured and killed in the city after a skirmish in which the head of his armed forces had also been killed.
Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi, Libyan leader, was born on June 7, 1942. He died on October 20, 2011, aged 69
