MBS

At the same time, Iran was taking advantage of the chaos across the region to increase its influence through covert support for militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and Iran were competing lodestars for Islam’s two largest sects. The Sunni kingdom considered itself a Vatican of sorts for the world’s Muslims and saw Iran’s Shiite faith as an aberration. For its part, Iran, ruled by a revolutionary Shiite government, saw Saudi Arabia as a prime adversary in its quest to export its revolution and undermine American and Israeli interests.

Sapping Saudi Arabia’s ability to confront these threats, the global oil price had begun a precipitous decline that would keep it well below $100 per barrel for years to come. That sapped the kingdom’s budget, giving it not only less money to throw at its problems, but also damaging its economy. The country was overflowing with young people who had grown up during the oil boom and had high expectations, but the government could no longer employ them the way it had their elders.

Further exacerbating the kingdom’s fears was a sense that the United States, on whom it had relied for its security since President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz during World War II, was not as loyal as the Saudis hoped. The Saudi leadership did not like or trust President Barack Obama, and had little reason to believe that he liked them much either. They had grown angry with him in 2011 for saying that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt should leave power amid mass protests against his rule. Their frustrations grew when Obama did not provide more support to the rebels in Syria and declined to bomb President al-Assad after he used chemical weapons on his people in 2013, a tactic that Obama had previously declared a “red line.” They then learned that the Obama administration had engaged in intensive negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. The talks had been kept secret from the Saudis, solidifying the feeling that they had been betrayed by their most important ally.

As these challenges mounted, Salman ascended to the throne, with MBS in tow. Few Saudi watchers knew much about the young prince at the time.

Salman put in place a new royal lineup, elevating to crown prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, a younger half brother whom King Abdullah had placed in the line of succession. Muqrin had an impressive background, having trained at a British air force academy and held a number of governorships before serving as the head of Saudi intelligence. Foreign officials who worked with him suspected that he owed his later prominence to King Abdullah’s fondness for him. Muqrin was a raconteur and joke-teller, and King Abdullah had liked having him around. He was the youngest surviving son of King Abdulaziz, but his mother was a Yemeni concubine, which normally would have disqualified him from becoming king.

Salman also appointed as second in line to the throne Mohammed bin Nayef, a nephew and head of the Interior Ministry, who was best known for spearheading the kingdom’s campaign against Al Qaeda. The elevation made MBN, as he was known, the first of the grandsons of King Abdulaziz to be directly in the line of succession.

While most of the attention was focused on the well-known royals filling the top jobs, 29-year-old MBS stepped out of the shadows. Salman named him minister of defense, giving him oversight of the military, and put him in charge of the Royal Court, which gave him control over access to his father and the royal purse strings. MBS would leverage both jobs to increase his power.

MBS and his aides would later describe how they got to work immediately to confront what they recognized as a looming crisis born of low oil prices and exacerbated by poor management under the previous monarch. From 2010 to 2014, when oil prices were high and as King Abdullah’s health declined, constraints on government spending had fallen away, with increasingly large contracts slipping through with little or no scrutiny.

After King Abdullah died, MBS pulled together four advisers, who worked through the night to come up with a plan to restructure the government—and begin centralizing power under MBS. The next day, MBS ordered up a royal decree that abolished a range of government bodies and replaced them with two supreme councils, one for economic development, the other for security. MBS took charge of the first, giving him vast powers over the kingdom’s economy. He would later take over the second.

“From the first twelve hours, decisions were issued,” MBS said later. “In the first ten days, the entire government was restructured.”

One of MBS’s economic advisers later estimated that between $80 billion and $100 billion, or one-quarter of the Saudi budget, had been lost every year to inefficient spending. In the first few months of Salman’s rule, when the low oil price forced the kingdom to dig into its reserves to pay the bills, MBS’s team discovered that that trajectory would leave them “completely broke” in two years. The gravity of the looming crisis put the adviser “on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.”

Over the course of that first year, MBS would slim the government budget, reimpose spending controls, and take other measures to slow the kingdom’s race toward insolvency. But old habits died hard. Less than a month into his reign, King Salman decreed the payout of a two-month salary bonus to every government employee, soldier, and university student at home and abroad as part of a vast spending package estimated at $32 billion—more than the annual budget of Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. For a leadership that would make fiscal responsibility a central talking point, it was a bald bid for popularity through royal largesse.

The naming of MBS as the minister of defense did not immediately draw much attention, because the Saudi military had little history of fighting wars. Instead, it had served to employ large numbers of Saudi men and enabled princes to sign massive weapons contracts with the United States and other Western countries to underpin alliances and enrich networks of middlemen.

MBS saw little reason not to put the military to work. On March 26, he ordered the Saudi Air Force to start bombing Yemen, the kingdom’s poor, dysfunctional southern neighbor, in an effort to drive out the Houthi rebels who had taken over the capital and restore the government they had toppled. Senior U.S. officials received little notice that the intervention was coming before Saudi officials asked if they could count on American support. Saudi diplomats, including Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, flew to foreign capitals to convince the kingdom’s allies that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. That prediction turned out to be woefully off-base, and the war in Yemen was an early sign that MBS would take a new, hands-on approach to the region.

More royal decrees followed. One changed the name of the Yemen operation from “Decisive Storm” to “Restoring Hope,” a linguistic switch to suggest that the heavy lifting was over and it was now time to mop up. The king also removed Muqrin, the noted raconteur, as crown prince, saying it had been at his request, and replaced him with Mohammed bin Nayef, the esteemed security chief. The move was well-received in Washington because MBN had coordinated with the United States on security and was close to the Central Intelligence Agency.

MBS also moved up. His father named him deputy crown prince, putting him second in line to the throne, and made him the head of the board that oversaw Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s economic crown jewel.

Had a figure as unknown as MBS come to power so swiftly in the United States and immediately restructured the government and launched a new war, there would have been a scramble for information about him. Newspapers would have dug into his background, tracking down old friends, acquaintances, and bosses while seeking out the details of his personal life and financial dealings. In Saudi Arabia, none of this happened. The king had chosen his son, and it was the citizens’ job to praise him, not to question his qualifications.

The Saudi news media published profiles with scant details about MBS’s past: his stint as a government researcher, his jobs under his father, his positions with youth and heritage organizations. No one publicly questioned his qualifications to oversee the oil industry or the military. Foreign officials knew even less. For months, even his age was unclear. Publications, including The New York Times, repeatedly said he was “believed to be about 30.” Politico noted that he was “something of a mystery to U.S. leaders, but he serves as the Saudi defense minister and has a hawkish reputation. He is believed to be King Salman’s favorite son and often is referred to as ‘MbS.’”

IT WAS NOT long after his elevation to deputy crown prince that Washington got its first glimpse of MBS. In May 2015, the leaders of the Gulf Arab monarchies came to Washington for a summit at Camp David with President Obama. It was an awkward visit, not least because of the rustic conditions. American presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had slipped away to the rural Maryland retreat to host high-profile dignitaries far from the hubbub of the capital. That history meant little to the Gulf royals, who were accustomed to palaces and luxury hotels. Sleeping in rustic cabins, walking dirt trails, and riding through forests on golf carts was not their idea of a good time. And relations were already sour, due to Obama’s push for the nuclear agreement with Iran. The Americans were well aware of the Gulf leaders’ bruised egos, so the meet-up was designed to reassure them that the United States remained committed to their security.

Although he had been expected to attend, King Salman stayed home, but he sent both MBN and MBS, and Obama welcomed them in the Oval Office before the summit. It was the first time top members of the Obama administration met MBS, and a number of them recalled that he appeared uncomfortable and out of place. He spoke little, deferring to his older cousin, who was comfortable in English and was used to such situations. When Obama addressed MBS in English to bring him into the conversation, the young prince responded nervously through an Arabic translator.

But right after the meeting, Adel al-Jubeir, who had been promoted to foreign minister, asked Susan Rice, the national security adviser, for a private meeting with MBS. She agreed, and they met in Rice’s office, where MBS warmed up, speaking at length about his wife and family and declaring that he planned to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.

It was clearly an effort to charm her, a targeted pitch to a powerful woman who could have continued into a future Clinton administration. White House officials were struck by MBS’s strategic move, but also confused. As soon as he had appeared on the scene, American spies had gathered information about him for a personality profile, as they did of all foreign leaders. That had turned up a perplexing situation: MBS had locked his own mother in a palace with two of her sisters. Even more perplexing was that he was hiding his mother’s whereabouts from his own father, the king.

At the time, MBS’s mother was the king’s only remaining wife and he was fond of her. But when he would ask where she was, MBS and his aides would proffer excuses, usually saying she was abroad for medical treatment.

Other members of the royal family had also noticed the apparent disappearance of MBS’s mother. Around the time that Salman became king, she had stopped showing up at family weddings, funerals, and holiday celebrations, leading them to conclude that her son had locked her up somewhere. But, like the Americans, they didn’t know why.

There were a number of theories. American officials and some plugged-in Saudis thought MBS feared his mother would interfere with his rise because she worried that his ambition would split the royal family. Others proposed wilder scenarios, such as MBS suspecting his mother of using black magic on the king to promote other members of her family.

Saudi officials deemed any inquiry into the whereabouts of the king’s wife highly offensive and never provided any information. Other royals considered it inappropriate to inquire, as did American officials, since it did not affect affairs of state. But many wondered what MBS’s ability to confine his own mother and hide her from his father said about his character.

YOUNG PRINCE RISING

WHILE MBS REMAINED a relative mystery, the new crown prince was a known quantity at home and abroad. Mohammed bin Nayef was a reserved man in his mid-fifties with glasses and a brush mustache who avoided the media other than allowing journalists to photograph him when he visited wounded security officers in the hospital. For more than a decade, he had been the giant of the kingdom’s fight against terrorism, first as deputy to his father and later as the head of the Interior Ministry, which oversaw Saudi intelligence and the conventional and secret police.

In 2003, Al Qaeda had declared war on Saudi Arabia, launching a wave of attacks on civilian targets, including compounds where foreigners lived. The threat was so great that the United States withdrew diplomats’ families from the kingdom. MBN oversaw the response, launching a campaign of raids on militant hideouts that dismantled Al Qaeda’s network in the kingdom and stopped the attacks. By the end of the decade, the diplomats’ families had returned.

That fight, which was closely coordinated with the United States, gave MBN deep relationships in Washington, especially in the Central Intelligence Agency. American officials who worked with MBN praised him as serious and hardworking, a spy chief dedicated to the kingdom’s security and to its partnership with the United States.

Inside Saudi Arabia, he was hailed as a hero and known as a deft manager of the kingdom’s religious figures, including many whose views bordered on, or veered into, extremism. The security services he oversaw were unflinching when it came to those who engaged in violence at home. But for everyone else, he championed a carrot-and-stick approach aimed at neutralizing their threat to the state. Homegrown ideologues were to be managed, not stamped out. Even young Saudis who fought with extremist groups abroad were treated as citizens who had been misled and who could, with the proper education and incentives, reintegrate into society.

That approach was put into practice at reform centers in the kingdom’s prisons that bore the prince’s name and used religious teaching, psychology, and cash to put wayward Saudi men on a new path. The centers found wives for the bachelors and granted married prisoners conjugal visits in a facility built like a hotel, with magnetic door cards, playgrounds for kids, and room service. There was never an independent audit to verify the approach’s effectiveness, but American officials came to appreciate it, and Saudis argued that it was more humane than locking people up indefinitely or killing them on the battlefield with drones.

MBN once told a visiting American dignitary that it had pained him to learn that Saudis had played an outsized role in the September 11 attacks.

“Terrorists stole the most valuable things we have,” he said. “They took our faith and our children and used them to attack us.”

His approach to dealing with militancy extended to the families of dead militants, who were told their sons had been “victims,” not “criminals.” That helped families deal with the social fallout caused by having militant offspring and sought to break the cycle of radicalization.

“If you stop five but create fifty” terrorists, MBN said, “that’s dumb.”

That focus on engagement almost killed him. In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with Al Qaeda in Yemen announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to MBN in person. The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him, and sat next to him. Then the man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBN what were described at the time as light wounds.

The next year, MBN provided further proof of his importance as a partner to the United States when he warned the White House and the CIA that powerful bombs hidden in cargo containers were headed for the United States. The bombs were intercepted in Dubai and the United Kingdom and defused.

That history made American officials grateful that the kingdom’s planned future ruler was someone they knew. MBN’s appointment as crown prince was also hailed as a smart way to pass power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons. MBN was popular at home and had only one wife and two daughters, which many assumed would allow him to focus on governance, not on promoting his sons.

But indications soon emerged that MBN’s position was not as secure as it appeared. King Salman collapsed the crown prince’s court into his own, depriving MBN of a major perk of his position and a platform to build ties with subjects. From then on, there was only one Royal Court, overseen by MBS.

That summer, Adel al-Jubeir, the longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington who had been named foreign minister, flew to Nantucket to see Secretary of State John Kerry and spoke to him of MBS as the future of the kingdom due to his focus on reform. Kerry made it clear that the United States would not take sides in a princely struggle over who would inherit the kingdom.

MBS was also little known in the wider Arab world, including among Saudi Arabia’s closest neighbors. Like its fellow smaller monarchies in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates had long viewed Saudi Arabia warily as the region’s giant, whose wealth, power, and population dwarfed its own. For years, the Emiratis had wanted to step out of the Saudi shadow and develop their own national standing, and their leaders privately looked down on their Saudi counterparts as elderly conservatives wedded to ossified ways. An American diplomat wrote that Emirati leaders described the kingdom as “run by cantankerous old men surrounded by advisors who believe the earth is flat.”

The de facto ruler of the Emirates was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, a helicopter pilot and sharp tactician known by his own three-letter moniker, MBZ. He was tall, kept in shape, and maintained a modest demeanor that was uncommon among Gulf royals, sometimes rising during meetings to serve guests coffee or tea. MBZ had worked to give his country international clout that outweighed its size. The Emirates had fewer citizens than Dallas, Texas, and a relatively small army. But he equipped it with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and built special forces units that fought alongside American troops in Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. While few Americans had heard of his country or its leader, he had poured huge sums into lobbying efforts in Washington to make sure that his views on the Middle East reached the centers of power.

King Salman’s appointment of MBN as crown prince did not bode well for the Emirates, since MBN did not get along with MBZ, who had once insulted MBN’s father, saying that the older prince’s clumsiness proved that “Darwin was right.”

But MBZ was curious about MBS and summoned regional experts to see what they knew. He was impressed and deputized his younger brother to get to know the young Saudi. A desert camping trip was arranged so that the two could meet, and they hit it off. It was a deft move on MBZ’s part that laid the foundations of a strengthened regional alliance. Both men benefited. MBS got a powerful mentor who supported his quest to become Saudi Arabia’s future ruler. In return, MBZ impressed his vision of the region on the inexperienced young Saudi, particularly his animosity toward Iran and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.

MBZ began selling MBS to any American official who would listen. MBN was the past and MBS was the future, he argued, suggesting that the administration invest in that future by choosing an official to build a relationship with MBS. President Obama’s policy was that the United States would not take sides in an issue as weighty as who would become the next Saudi king. But there was talk inside the administration of finding an “MBS whisperer” who could mentor the young prince. John Kerry was suggested, but was too busy. Ash Carter, the secretary of defense, was MBS’s natural counterpart, but wasn’t interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed, but deemed too old.

In the end, the idea never took off—at least not until a young Jewish real estate investor from New Jersey named Jared Kushner entered the White House with the next administration.

AS MBS’s POWER grew, so did his interest in tremendous wealth and its trappings. If he had spent his youth watching his wealthier cousins amass fortunes, take lavish vacations, and drop mind-blowing sums on prime real estate, his turn had now come.

His father was king and so could spend as he wished, and MBS’s position enabled him to create new income streams. One involved the Saudi national airline, Saudia, which had planned to buy fifty jets from Airbus, earning a bulk discount while upgrading its fleet. Instead, MBS arranged for a company overseen by his younger brother to buy the jets and lease them to the airline, rerouting the discount and other profits to his family.

In June 2015, the same month that deal was inked, MBS took a group of friends on vacation to the Maldives, a collection of palm-studded islands scattered like strings of pearls in the Indian Ocean. They set up camp at a hyper-luxury resort called Velaa Private Island, where accommodations normally ran from $1,500 to $30,000 per night. To ensure their privacy, the entourage rented out the whole place, giving them exclusive access to its amenities. These included the sandy beaches that ringed the island; the villas with thatched roofs on stilts in the sky-blue ocean; a spa with a cloud-shaped pod that rocked guests into deep relaxation; and the only “snow room” in the Maldives, where vacationers could take a break from the sun and surf with some manufactured arctic chill.

The developer had built the place from scratch, tearing out the native bushes and papaya trees and bringing in paneling from Borneo, deck chairs from Italy, and paving stones from the Jordanian desert that would not burn the feet no matter how long they sat in the sun.

“I always had this idea that our guests would find themselves stranded on a deserted island, and by coincidence, there is this unique resort,” the resort’s Czech architect said.

But relaxation, snorkeling, and watching baby sharks and dolphins visit the coral reef were not the only diversions. MBS also hosted a string of blowout parties, with headline talent ferried in to entertain the guests.

Psy, the South Korean singer, performed “Gangnam Style.” The American rapper Pitbull was photographed in sunglasses and a tan suit being escorted to a seaplane. A few days later, someone photographed the Colombian singer Shakira in a black T-shirt and tights being taken to a VIP terminal at the airport.

“The party has been going on for some days now and we don’t know exactly how long it would last,” a local news site said.

“The Maldives is heaven like, thank you Mr. Smejc,” Pitbull wrote to the resort’s financier, Jirí Smejc, after his trip. “The island was unforgettable. Look forward to the next trip.”

MBS’s vacation came three months after Saudi Arabia had launched its military intervention in Yemen, which fell under his purview as the minister of defense. A number of American officials who reached out to him during that time found him unreachable. Then American intelligence reports came in, explaining that the prince was on vacation in the Maldives.

The parties eventually died down, and the flap they caused may have encouraged MBS to look for a place of his own, where local reporters would not pry into his affairs and post photographs of his guests on the Internet. He found it a month later, floating in the Mediterranean off the coast of France. Near the Port De La Ciotat on the French Riviera was Serene. She was not just any boat, but a superyacht, a tad under 440 feet long, with navy blue sides, white upper decks, and a helipad on her nose. When she hit the water in 2011, an industry publication hailed her as “one of the ten largest yachts ever built in the world and one of the finest in terms of sophistication and technology.” She had a helicopter hangar, water-level hatches for speedboats, and a submarine dock. And she was massive, with 48,000 square feet of internal space, more than the base of the Parthenon or the concourse of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.