Robert Evans

It's like, are they really terrorists?

Are the Americans making all this stuff up, right?

Yeah.

And the Black Prince's son, Mohammed bin Nayef, MBN, seems to have been one of the rare people high up in the royal family because of his training with these Western agencies, who actually is like, no, al-Qaeda is probably an issue, and they'll be an issue for us too, right?

His feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more in line with how the Americans are feeling, right?

And so he spends a lot of the 90s burnishing his credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies, being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family who sees things clearly that you can work with.

There's a big moment of conflict between the elder Naif and the CIA in 1998.

Vice President Al Gore goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia alongside Bruce Riedel, who's now working for the NSC.

They met both naifs and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack the U.S.

consulate while they were there.

Up to that point, al-Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right?

And so now while Al Gore is in country, they bust a plan to attack the consulate while the U.S.

vice president there, and that really rattles people.

And suddenly Mohammed bin Nayef is the only guy who's been saying like, hey, we should be taking al-Qaeda seriously.

And suddenly he gets a lot of attention.

It's like, oh, maybe he was right.

Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time, and we should be listening to this guy when it comes to security advice.

Yeah.

So in 1999, MBN is appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security.

By the fall of 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government to talk to about counterterrorism.