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Ministries that once occupied whole buildings in Kuwait function out of single rooms. One can find the Finance Ministry, for example, in Room 311. Surrounded by six chairs, two card tables in the middle of the room offer all the flat work space available. Several phones and a single fax machine connect the ministry with the rest of the world. There are two currency counters and enough calculators to ensure that Kuwait Inc. functions to the proper decimal points. A shredder sits near a large safe, opposite a small television set. But CNN, which everyone is eager to watch, is available only on another TV, two floors up -- a Saudi concession, since the kingdom prohibits the public reception of CNN everywhere else.
Without a country to govern, many in Taif have little to do but worry. They dial around the world in search of news, play countless rounds of hand, the 14-card Kuwaiti version of gin rummy, and recall receiving Iraqi television transmissions at home in Kuwait. "Saddam was on all the time," says a Kuwaiti minister. "On any given day you could see him instructing women on how to make tomato paste, or children on how to brush their teeth. It was some of the best comedy around."
Not everyone in Taif is idle, of course. With critical chores to perform, the Finance Ministry, for one, churns almost around the clock. The Finance Minister, Sheik Ali al-Khalifa al-Sabah, 45, known to all as Abu Khalifa -- and to a few close friends as Ali Cash -- is highly regarded among both Kuwaitis and foreigners. "He can sell you the shirt off your back while you're wearing it," says a friend, affectionately. "He is absolutely one of the smartest, shrewdest people I have ever met."
Although born into the ruling Sabah family, which now numbers about 1,000 extended relatives, Khalifa worked his way up through various jobs in the Finance and Oil ministries. Over the past 12 years he has held each of those crucial Cabinet portfolios several times, and was once minister of both simultaneously.
Until he was 12, Khalifa attended elementary school in Baghdad, where his Iraqi-born mother went to live after her husband died. Khalifa learned English at a private academy in Cairo, and like every Kuwaiti who wanted a college education before Kuwait University was inaugurated in 1966, went abroad to study. Before being graduated with a B.A. in mathematics from San Francisco State University, Khalifa spent two years at Berkeley, where his chemistry lab partner was Mario Savio, the radical student leader who founded the Free Speech Movement. "To be at Berkeley in the '60s was wonderful," says Khalifa. "We studied a bit, attended anti-Vietnam demonstrations and listened to Joan Baez, who was always around singing."
Pegged a comer early on, Khalifa worked for the Finance Ministry between graduate studies in London and Beirut, often jetting home weekly for meetings. Before he was 30, Khalifa was representing Kuwait at important OPEC meetings. "I remember once when I went to Baghdad to explain our views on oil prices," says Khalifa. "After I finished my presentation, I was called to another building to see Saddam. Before I could go through it all again, Saddam said, 'Khalifa, your explanation is not valid.' There had been no time for anyone at the earlier meeting to have briefed him, but Saddam knew exactly what I had said. Even then he had everything bugged."