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Prince Abdullah's newfound enthusiasm for counterterrorism was not a product of 9/11. Whereas U.S. allies like Germany, France and Singapore responded to the attacks on America with aggressive battles against hidden al-Qaeda cells in their territories, Saudi Arabia acted as if the 15 Saudi hijackers had come, literally, out of nowhere. In fact, Saudi Arabia has been crawling with al-Qaeda activists, as revealed by Abdullah's recent crackdown. That campaign was sparked by an atrocity the royal family took personally, the May 12 attacks by al-Qaeda on three housing complexes in Riyadh that killed 35 people, including nine suicide bombers. Since then, Saudi authorities in more than 100 operations have killed at least 11 al-Qaeda suspects and arrested more than 200.
The militants have not gone down easily. In those sweeps, 11 Saudi security officials have died. The four members of an al-Qaeda unit, cornered in a house in the al-Jouf region, chose to bind themselves together and blow themselves up with hand grenades rather than get caught. In a number of raids, suspects managed to get away: at least two broke out of a safe house under surveillance, 10 escaped from another hideaway when police approached, and seven slipped through a police cordon during a five-hour gun battle in Riyadh. One arrest suggested al-Qaeda may have penetrated Saudi security forces: the suspect was a police officer. Saudi forces have unearthed huge arms caches: 93 rocket-propelled grenades in one spot, 20 tons of homemade explosives in another, a ton of the plastic explosive RDX elsewhere.
Security forces came across a different kind of find on the body of Yousif Salih Fahad al-Ayeeri, an al-Qaeda strategist and fund raiser known as Swift Sword, who was shot as he fled a patrol on May 31. He was carrying a letter with a signature that the Saudis authenticated as Osama bin Laden's. An al-Qaeda activist in detention told the Saudis he took the letter into Saudi Arabia in February.
After the May 12 attacks, the House of Saud understood that it was under direct assault by an organization committed to its overthrow. Though bin Laden, a Saudi, long ago condemned the royal family for allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil starting in 1990, his group had refrained from violence within the kingdom. Its reasons were clear to U.S. intelligence. Says a former Bush Administration official: "There were al-Qaeda agents in the kingdom that urged al-Qaeda not to strike in Saudi Arabia because they [the Saudis] might cut off the spigot" of funds flowing to the group.