Robert Evans

I bet they had some great shit.

Oh, yeah.

So it's hard to say to what extent is this.

He and his dad are kind of working together, knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the West and can seem like he's modern and someone who can

you know, give me arm in arm with the clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity.

But there do seem to have been some real clashes between them, right?

One of them is over the fact that his dad, the Black Prince,

Doesn't take seriously the dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

Like he keeps being told, hey, there's something brewing in your country.

And he's like, nah, I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going to be like two words that show up next to each other in the public imagination.

Right.

Per that analysis by the Brookings Institute, Nayef was conspicuously slow to recognize that al-Qaeda posed a threat to the kingdom.

He'd become friendly with bin Laden during the Russian-Afghan war when bin Laden was allied with the Mujahideen and viewed him as being exclusively focused on defeating the Soviets.

Nayef believed al-Qaeda's reputation as a terrorist organization was a product of American propaganda and was sure that al-Qaeda posed no real threat to the kingdom, a delusion he had in common with much of the royal family.

Prince Naif was not popular with the CIA.

He was seen as uncooperative, and for good reason.

In 1996, when Shiite terrorists bombed a U.S.

Air Force base in Dahan and killed 19 Americans, the CIA asked Naif for information on the terrorists and their ties to Iran.

Despite the kingdom and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Nayef stonewalled the U.S.

Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd attack Iran, and he wanted to avoid war.