Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude

Sleeping with the Devil : How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude, Robert Baer, pages 48, 51

“Call it poetic coincidence. But right as the Carlyle Group was getting into its annual investor conference at Washington’s Ritz Carlton Hotel on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, only two and a half miles to the south. . . At the meeting were the group’s senior counsel, James Baker, secretary of state in the Bush I administration; then Carlyle chairman Frank Carlucci, Ronald Reagan’s last secretary of defense and national security advisor before that; and Shafiq bin Laden, representing the Bin Laden Group -- one of the world’s largest construction companies – but far more famous today as Osama bin Laden’s brother. The gathering was the perfect metaphor for Washington’s strange affair with Saudi Arabia. . .

Carlyle’s most famous advisor is George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States. . . Indeed, even as his son was campaigning for the presidency in 2000, papa Bush flew to a posh desert compound outside Riyadh to discuss Saudi-U.S. business relationships with Crown Prince ‘Abdallah. Carlyle insists that Bush was not carrying the investment firm’s portfolio on the trip, but it could not have escaped the notice of his superwealthy hosts that G.H.W. Bush is a trusted and highly valued Carlyle senior advisor – with a son making a run at the White House.”