Blood and Oil

The call just before 4 a.m. was urgent and unnerving. The king needed to see his nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, as soon as possible. "Come right away," the caller from the Royal Court said.

For decades, Alwaleed had been the world's best-known Saudi businessman. He was the kind of person people wanted to be around, if only to glimpse life with a seemingly bottomless supply of money. With personal wealth estimated at $18 billion, he was, in the eyes of many Americans and Europeans, the ultimate Saudi: fabulously rich, debonair, and excessive to the extreme. He had a fleet of planes, including a 747 jet with a throne-like chair in the middle, and a $90 million yacht that comfortably slept twenty-two guests with thirty crew members to look after them. When he found something he liked, he'd buy ten or twenty of it—even if it was an expensive and bulky exercise machine. One for each home, pied-à-terre, desert camp, and yacht.

Alwaleed delighted in that image and in representations of his own image, showing visitors to his offices in Riyadh, Paris, and New York thick stacks of magazines with his face on the cover or long interviews about his business career. Some rooms in his homes contained more than a dozen photos or paintings of Alwaleed at different stages of his life. He liked drinking tea from a mug with his face on it.

The prince was a force in American business, buying stakes in Citibank, Apple, and Twitter. In a partnership with Bill Gates, Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding Company owned a chunk of the Four Seasons hotel chain, famed for its luxury accommodations. When he traveled, he brought along a two-dozen-person retinue, including cooks, cleaners, butlers, and business advisors.

Yet here he was on a cool November night in 2017, feeling a chill down his spine as he got dressed at his desert retreat for the meeting with the king. Saudi Arabia was seeing huge changes, some of them obvious, like the retreat of religious police from the streets and the sound of music in cafés after decades of prohibition on anything that could arouse the senses. The country had so long been a refuge of the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam referred to by critics as Wahhabism that Saudi citizens felt truly dizzied by the fast-paced reforms: movie theaters were going up, women were walking around with more freedoms than ever before, and there was talk of shifting the economy away from oil for good.

The country's richest and most powerful also perceived something else, a cracking sound. The very foundations of their ornate palaces seemed to be weakening. It didn't matter that Alwaleed called heads of states and the wealthiest people in the world his friends. His unassailability as a billionaire prince was disintegrating.

After more than two years of the reign of his uncle King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Alwaleed had heard the stories about royals summoned in the night or tricked onto airplanes only to find themselves dragged home to Saudi Arabia and put in confinement. The man behind those renditions was King Salman's son, Alwaleed's young cousin Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, who was only thirty-two but had already gained a reputation for his temper and for charging ahead with aggressive changes.

Mohammed was the opposite of his uncles before him, the former kings who derived power from a royal consensus and tended toward extreme conservatism for fear of imperiling the dynasty. They had been desiccated old men by the time they took power, without the courage or energy to make big changes. But Mohammed was young and vital. He was well over six feet tall, with a smile so huge it made him squint, a big nose, and a tactile approach to conversation that could be simultaneously affectionate and menacing. He had plenty of energy, sending questions and commands to underlings at all hours of the day and night. In a short time, Mohammed had declared war on Yemen, led a boycott on a neighboring country, and consolidated more power than any member of the royal family since the founding of the kingdom.

Alwaleed reassured himself. The detained princes were fringe members of the family and often political dissidents, stirring up trouble for the Al Saud from their homes in France or the United Kingdom. He had told a visitor just months before how impressed he was with Mohammed's agenda and how excited he was to see Saudi Arabia finally transition from an illiberal bastion of the most conservative strain of Islam to a modern Arab power with a diversifying economy and more equal rights for men and women. Mohammed had even adopted some of Alwaleed's most aggressive ideas for financial reform.

"This is the change I've been waiting for my whole life," Alwaleed told Robert Jordan, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, in April 2017. CEOs, bankers, and political leaders from around the world had visited him at the retreat where he was staying, a desert site outside Riyadh full of large tents where his guests pretended to re-create an idealized version of the Bedouin lifestyle his ancestors lived up until the mid-twentieth century.

What's more, Alwaleed was so generous. His crowd sat around feasts fit for a small village, complete with roast lamb, mounds of rice, and an assortment of juices. Alwaleed, a health nut who kept doctors around full-time, partook of specially prepared vegan meals. After his guests made a modest dent in the food, Alwaleed would invite poorer Saudis from the surrounding region to finish off the platters.

Afterward, he'd bring his guests for walks on the dunes and stargazing as they sat around a roaring fire. It wasn't entirely rustic. When the prince and his party retired to the tents, there were flat-screen televisions and trailers with gleaming bathrooms and hot showers.

Not long after the call, Alwaleed left the desert camp in his own car for the trip back into Riyadh. Arriving at the Royal Court more than an hour later, an aide to the king came outside to explain that the meeting was actually nearby at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. He was guided to a new car, part of a large convoy. "My phone, my bag," Alwaleed said, growing concerned. "They're in the car."

"Yes, we'll bring them," came the reply. Cut off from the world, Alwaleed grew anxious. His guards, assistant, and driver were placed in separate cars. The drive only took a few minutes, culminating in a slow journey up the grand, quarter-mile driveway from the security gate to the hotel.

Entering the lobby surrounded by security personnel of the Royal Court, he told friends later, he was struck by an eerie feeling that the hotel was empty. The Royal Court men took him into an elevator and then a hotel suite to wait. Worried and a bit bored, he turned on the television. News was flashing that dozens of businessmen, royal family members, and officials were being arrested on suspicion of corruption. He was the first to arrive. The Ritz was no longer a hotel but a makeshift prison.

The renovations had been ordered only hours earlier. Late on Friday, November 3, 2017, a team of engineers at the Ritz-Carlton fanned out across the hotel's nine floors and began drilling out the locks on two hundred hotel-room doors. Curtains were removed and shower doors dismantled. Several large suites usually reserved for visiting CEOs or jet-setting princes were converted into interrogation rooms.

The Ritz-Carlton, originally designed as a state guest house for visiting dignitaries, has a palm-lined driveway that allows visiting prime ministers and presidents to take in its grand palatial facade as they roll up in motorcades. The grounds—all owned by the nearby Royal Court—comprise fifty-two acres of benign opulence, with manicured lawns and a shaded courtyard with six-hundred-year-old olive trees imported from Lebanon. Visiting its ornate lobby, full of marble, guests are greeted by a large flower display, dramatic sculptures of stallions, and the faint smell of oud incense smoldering at tables where some Saudi men perfume their head coverings, known as shemaghs. President Barack Obama stayed on the grounds in 2014, and President Donald Trump stayed nearby for two days during a glitzy visit shortly after assuming the US presidency.

Arriving that night, a team of intelligence officers and Royal Court staff walked briskly inside to take over the hotel. Guards dispersed to posts on each floor and manned the exits. Hotel staff were directed to eject anyone still inside the building and cancel upcoming reservations.

"Due to unforeseen booking by local authorities which requires an elevated level of security, we are unable to accommodate guests until normal operations are restored," a concierge said, reading from a script, to a businessman with a reservation days away.

Near dawn, the special guests began to arrive.

For the first few nights, many of the detainees were made to stay in a function room with periodic bathroom breaks, always accompanied by an armed escort. Some of the men still had backup cell phones hidden in the folds of their thobes, since their escorts stopped searching after confiscating one phone from each man. Surreptitious photos taken that night show resigned men lying on thin mattresses with cheap, colorful blankets. The images don't make clear, however, that these were some of the most powerful men in the Arab world: would-be heirs to the throne, billionaire tycoons, ministers, and a dozen princes. Some held secrets that needed prying open. Nearly all of them had unimaginable wealth, which the new powers that be in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia claimed were the fruits of decades of corruption.

The list was nearly unfathomable, including even Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, son of the former king and powerful head of the Saudi National Guard—a special branch of the armed forces designed to protect the royal family from any threat, with 125,000 men stationed across the country. One of its roles is to prevent military coups, but here was its chief, once seen as a potential heir to the throne, held against his will.

In the first few days, more than fifty were arrested. The coming weeks would see more than three hundred others "checked into" the Ritz and other secure locations in Riyadh.

The arrests were the work of a hitherto secret anticorruption committee created by a decree from the king. The Saudi attorney general announced he was seeking the return of $100 billion derived from corruption and theft over decades.

Though conducted in the name of King Salman, the arrests of Saudi Arabia's richest and most powerful men had been engineered by the king's sixth son, Mohammed. Three years earlier, even close Saudi watchers had never heard of him. Now the new crown prince was taking Saudi Arabia and the world by storm.