MBS
THE RISE TO POWER OF
MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN

Ben Hubbard

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Ben Hubbard 2020

Cover design by Christopher Brand

Cover photograph by Ricardo Mazalan/AP/Shutterstock

Ben Hubbard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008340551

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008340575

Version: 2020-02-19

Dedication

To my parents,

for always keeping so many books around

Epigraph

And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes.

—NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI, The Prince

Ask the young. They know everything.

—JOSEPH JOUBERT

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Introduction

THE KINGDOM

ARRIVALS

CORONATION

YOUNG PRINCE RISING

COURTING OBAMA

NO SUCH THING AS WAHHABISM

GRAND VISIONS

A ROLE FOR JOURNALISM

THE TWO MOHAMMEDS

MBS’S WAR

SO-CALLED ALLIES

A TRUE FRIEND IN THE WHITE HOUSE

A STAB IN THE BACK

A JOURNALIST AT WORK

LORD OF THE FLIES

AN INSIDER IN EXILE

DRIVING A LIFE

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE CROWN PRINCE, PART ONE

WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE OUR PRIME MINISTER HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY SAUDI ARABIA

GUESTS OF THE KING

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

CHARM TOURS

BLACK PANTHER

OH CANADA

LOOKING FOR LOVE

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE CROWN PRINCE, PART TWO

AFTERWORD

Picture Section

Footnote

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS WORK IS based on hundreds of interviews in a half-dozen countries over six years; a range of English, Arabic, French, and Turkish publications, news accounts, and social media posts; and my experiences during multiple trips to Saudi Arabia between 2013 and 2018. It is a work of nonfiction, and in no place have I altered names, details, or facts to hide the identities of sources or enhance the narrative. The reader can find citations in the endnotes, as well as supplementary information.

The realities of working as a foreign journalist in Saudi Arabia changed substantially over the course of the events depicted in this book—first for the better, then for the worse. In addition to Saudi Arabia’s treatment of Jamal Khashoggi, the kingdom has imposed travel bans on thousands of Saudis and jailed and prosecuted citizens for expressing themselves online or communicating with foreign journalists. This has led me to err on the side of caution with the identification of Saudi sources, granting many anonymity. I am aware that this affects the transparency of the work, but I prefer that over endangering those who chose to share their stories, thoughts, and information with me.

For the rendering of Arabic names and phrases in English, I have followed no standard rules, but tried to ensure clarity for the nonspecialist reader.

Mohammed bin Salman declined to be interviewed for this book.

INTRODUCTION

BY THE TIME the young prince who was running the Arab world’s richest country was due to speak, a standing-room-only crowd of international investors, businessmen, millionaires, and billionaires had packed a luxurious hall under massive crystal chandeliers to await his appearance. It was fall 2017, and all had come to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, for a lavish investment conference that had unofficially been dubbed “Davos in the Desert” to give it the same ring of exclusivity and consequence as the annual meet-up of global powerbrokers in the Swiss Alps. This conference, however, had a different goal: to convince the assembled moneymen that the time was now to bet big on Saudi Arabia.

Over the previous days, the kingdom had worked hard to convince its thousands of guests that any preconceptions they had about Saudi Arabia were not true, or were at least on their way to not being true. The country was changing, they were told, opening up and shedding its past as a hyper-conservative, insular Islamic kingdom.

Saudi Arabia had long been known for two things: oil and Islam. The first was pooled in such great quantities under the kingdom’s sands that it had turned its royal family, the Al Saud, into one of the world’s richest dynasties, giving the country that bore their name a geo-strategic importance it otherwise would have lacked. The massive oil wealth had shaped the Saudi economy, giving an elite class of princes and businessmen tremendous wealth while most citizens either stayed home or earned salaries from government jobs that paid well and often required little work.

The official Islam of the kingdom was not any Islam, but Wahhabism, the ultraconservative and intolerant interpretation that was woven into the kingdom’s history. It taught the faithful to be wary of non-Muslim “infidels,” saw murderers and drug dealers beheaded in public squares, and deprived women of basic rights. The kingdom was far stricter than most other Islamic societies, but its status as the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, in Mecca and Medina, gave it unique clout among the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims.

Saudi leaders knew their kingdom’s troubled reputation, so the conference had been carefully planned to challenge how attendees saw the country. Guests had dined on grilled lamb and chocolate truffles at private dinners hosted by princes and officials in opulent homes with swimming pools, art galleries, and hidden liquor cabinets. Women featured prominently in the program and mingled freely with men in the coffee shop of the Ritz-Carlton, with no obligation to cover their hair, as they had to elsewhere.

Slick presentations courted investors for grand initiatives. Saudi Arabia would become a global shipping and transport hub. Entertainment options for its 22 million citizens would proliferate, with amusement parks, cinemas, and concert venues, all of which had long been forbidden for religious reasons. Tourism would boom, with the development of long-neglected historic sites and the creation of a world-class eco-resort in the Red Sea. And in case anyone doubted that the changes were real, the kingdom was finally going to reverse the regulation that had long stood as the primary example of its oppression of women: In June 2018, it would let them drive.

The message was clear: Titanic changes were afoot in Saudi Arabia, and the man driving them was a mysterious, workaholic son of the king, named Mohammed bin Salman. He was 32 years old and out to remake the kingdom—and the wider Middle East—as fast as he could.

Seated in plush chairs or on the tan carpet, the conference attendees had come to take the measure of the young prince. Was he for real? Was he a visionary leader who would drag Saudi Arabia from its conservative past or a rash upstart who would drive it into the ground?

Murmurs raced through the hall as a side door opened, and the prince appeared. He wore the standard outfit for Saudi men: a long white gown with snaps down the front, known as a thobe; a red-and-white-checkered headdress held in place with a black cord; and black sandals. He was chubby, due to his fondness for fast food, and he wore a scruffy beard that climbed high up his cheeks, telegraphing that he was too busy working to waste time on superfluous grooming. Flanked by aides and trailed by photographers and television cameras, he ascended the stage and sank into a white armchair.

He had emerged from obscurity less than three years before, a prince among thousands of princes, who had charmed and plotted his way to the top of the kingdom’s power structure. When his elderly father, King Salman, ascended to the throne in 2015, he gave his son oversight of the kingdom’s most important portfolios: defense, economy, religion, and oil. Then, shoving aside older relatives, he became the crown prince, putting him next in line to the throne. His father remained the head of state, but it was clear that Prince Mohammed was the hands-on ruler, the kingdom’s overseer and CEO.

To distinguish him from the mass of his royal relatives, Saudis and Saudi watchers referred to him by his initials, MBS. He was a large man with a presence that filled up rooms. In public and private, he dispensed with the formal Arabic customary among Arab leaders and spoke rapidly in dialect, gesticulating with his large hands, his voice deep like a growl. He often overflowed with energy, his thoughts coming so fast he interrupted himself mid-sentence. During audiences with foreign officials, he would sometimes hold forth on his vision for the future for an hour or more without pausing for questions. One foreign official recalled that the prince’s leg never stopped bouncing during their meeting, making him wonder if the prince was nervous or on some kind of stimulant.

On stage that day, MBS addressed the moderator in English to show his foreign guests that he could, then switched to Arabic to unveil yet another hyper-ambitious project: NEOM, a city that would rise from an isolated plot of desert near the Red Sea, where businessmen would write the laws and entice the world’s top minds to innovate on Saudi soil. Planning for a post-carbon future and taking advantage of the Saudi sun, the city would be powered by solar energy and staffed by so many robots that they might outnumber the human inhabitants. NEOM, MBS said, would cost $500 billion and be a place for “dreamers.” It was not an economic development project, but a “civilizational leap for humanity.”

The lights dimmed and the audience watched a flashy video about the proposed city. Then the moderator, a foreign woman journalist, asked whether the kingdom’s religious conservatism would hinder a project so focused on the future. MBS dismissed the idea that intolerance was part of Saudi history, insisting that the kingdom sought to engage with the rest of the world for the benefit of everyone.

We were not like this in the past. We are only returning to what we were, a moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world, and to all the religions, and to all traditions and peoples.

Seventy percent of the Saudi people are younger than 30 years old. With all truthfulness, we will not waste thirty years of our lives dealing with any extremist ideas. We will destroy them today, immediately. We want to live a natural life, a life that translates our religion into tolerance and our good customs and traditions, and we’ll live with the world and contribute to the development of the whole world.

Such a vow had never been made in public by a Saudi leader. The audience erupted in applause.

TWO WEEKS LATER, a harsher reality set in. Over a few days, officials from the Royal Court and the secret police rounded up hundreds of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest and most powerful men, including a number of MBS’s royal relatives—and even some who had attended his wedding. They were stripped of their cellphones, guards, and drivers and locked in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, turning the investment conference’s luxury setting into a five-star prison. There was a new future on the way for Saudi Arabia, and it would involve more than robots and women driving.

The government said the detentions were a crackdown on corruption, and many Saudis welcomed the idea. They had long watched princes and businessmen muscle their way into lucrative contracts or run other schemes to siphon fortunes from the government’s coffers. Some of those locked in the Ritz were among the worst offenders.

But other well-known offenders remained free, raising doubts about the crackdown’s true goals. Other aspects were strange, too. While the arrests were taking place, the committee leading the investigations was announced. It was led by MBS, the source of whose own wealth had never been scrutinized. Hadn’t the prince himself spent nearly a half-billion dollars on a yacht? What about his French château, hailed in magazines as “the world’s most expensive home”? Later, a proxy buyer said to be acting for MBS plunked down $450.3 million for a Leonardo da Vinci painting.

The detainees in the Ritz were told they were guests of the king, but their treatment was far from benign. As their ordeal dragged on, their loved ones cautiously reached out to me to curse MBS. One was from a storied Saudi business family who said she had heard nothing from her detained relative for weeks until he suddenly called.

“I am fine,” he told her, convincing her that he was anything but.

The call ended in three minutes.

She saw the crackdown as a ploy by MBS to commandeer the kingdom’s capital for his own ends while tarring the reputations of all who might challenge him.

“He is a psycho. He has spite. He wants to break people. He doesn’t want anyone to have an honorable name but him,” she told me. “He is a devil, and the devil is learning from him.”

IN ONLY A few years, Mohammed bin Salman had become the dominant force in Saudi Arabia and one of the most dynamic and scrutinized leaders in the world. His prominence was not preordained. For much of his life, he was lost in the crowd of richer, more experienced princes and low down the totem pole in a family where seniority reigned. So how did he do it? This book tells the story.

MBS could prove to be Saudi Arabia’s most momentous ruler since his grandfather founded the kingdom eight decades ago and made it a key partner of the United States. MBS’s rise came six decades after his grandfather’s death, during a time of serious threats to the Arab world’s richest country. The oil price was crashing, sapping its economy. Two-thirds of its citizens were under age 30, scrambling for jobs and chafing under strict social restrictions. In the wider Middle East, the jihadists of the Islamic State were rampaging through Iraq and Syria and bombing the kingdom. Iran, Saudi Arabia’s nemesis, was taking advantage of the region’s turmoil to expand its influence.

Exacerbating these challenges were doubts about the commitment of the kingdom’s most important ally: the United States. President Barack Obama had little fondness for the place. Before becoming president, he had dismissed Saudi Arabia as a “so-called” ally and criticized its exportation of Wahhabism for fueling intolerance in the Muslim world. His administration would forge a nuclear deal with Iran while Congress passed legislation allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia over the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, as well as their leader, Osama bin Laden, were Saudis. Both moves were stinging slaps to a kingdom that depended on the United States for protection, spent billions of dollars on American weapons, and expected a certain loyalty in return.

MBS would attack all these problems and more, plunging the kingdom into a war in Yemen; launching a plan to overhaul the economy; charming executives from Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley; detaining another country’s prime minister to force his resignation; and forging a strong and unlikely bond with President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Inside the kingdom, he would defang the clerics, open cinemas and concert venues, and shatter traditions, locking up other royals—including his own mother—and putting in place a technological authoritarianism that would put his spies in people’s phones, manipulate social media, and lead to the state becoming involved in the gruesome murder of a journalist that would shock the world.

MBS’s rise rode the waves of global trends. As more of the world’s wealth was concentrated in fewer hands, populist authoritarians used nationalistic rhetoric to rally their people while shutting down outlets for opposition. Like the Communist Party in China and rising dictators from Egypt to Hungary, MBS saw no need for checks on his power and crushed all threats to it, perceived or otherwise. His was an era of Saudi Arabia first, and he would stop at nothing to make Saudi Arabia great again, on his terms.

The nationalistic tide rose in Western nations, too. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of President Trump in the United States turned their citizens and governments inward, cutting their authoritarian allies considerable slack. Those two events also showed that in politics truth often mattered less than the passions one could stir on social media. That was a lesson that MBS learned well, and put to use in his own kingdom.

MBS is a hugely divisive character, praised by supporters as a long-awaited game-changer in a region aching for it and dismissed by foes as a brutal dictator in the making. Inside Saudi Arabia, he is a giant whose face is everywhere—printed on cellphone covers and hung over entrances to shopping malls—and whose every initiative is sold as a masterstroke by loyal boosters and journalists. But much about him remains mysterious. Waves of arrests have shut down public discussion of his background, the wisdom of his plans, or his ability to carry them out. In some sectors, enthusiasm abounds, as social life loosens up and women get jobs their mothers never dreamed of. But fear is so widespread that a stray social media post or a private comment could lead to arrest or jail that many Saudis avoid talking on the phone or put their devices in the fridge when they meet.

MBS is at the root of both phenomena, driven by two tendencies that came into focus in late 2017 when he nearly simultaneously charmed the investment conference and locked people in the Ritz. He is determined to give Saudis a shining, prosperous future, and exercises an unflinching willingness to crush his foes. Combined in different doses, those attributes will likely guide his actions far into the future.

Some may consider it unwise—if not foolhardy—to write a book about such a young leader who could rule his country for decades. This book does not seek to tell MBS’s full story, but to narrate his remarkable rise and its effects on the kingdom, its relationships with the United States and the wider Middle East. MBS will determine where his story goes next. Here is how it began.

THE KINGDOM

IN 1996, A British-Algerian man teaching at an elite school in Jeddah on Saudi Arabia’s west coast got a unique job offer. A prince named Salman bin Abdulaziz was coming to town for a few months with one of his wives and her children, and the family was looking for an English tutor.

The teacher, Rachid Sekkai, knew a bit about Prince Salman. He was the governor of Riyadh Province, which put him in charge of the Saudi capital, and he was a son of the king who had founded Saudi Arabia, granting him high status among the thousands of princes and princesses who made up the royal family. The job sounded interesting, and would probably pay well, so Sekkai accepted, and for the next few months a chauffeur picked him up from school at the end of the workday and drove him to the royal compound where Salman and his family were staying.

Entering for the first time, Sekkai saw “a series of jaw-dropping villas with immaculate gardens maintained by workers in white uniforms.” He passed a parking lot full of luxury cars, including what appeared to be the first pink Cadillac he had ever seen in real life. At the palace, he met his charges: Salman’s four sons from his second wife, the eldest of whom was a mischievous 11-year-old named Mohammed bin Salman.

The young princes clearly had more interest in playing than in studying, but Sekkai did his best to keep the younger boys focused, an effort that collapsed when MBS showed up.

“As the oldest of his siblings, he seemed to be allowed to do as he pleased,” Sekkai recalled. During the lessons, MBS would take a walkie-talkie from one of the guards to make “cheeky remarks” about his instructor and joke with the guards on the other end of the line to regale his siblings.

After a few lessons, MBS informed Sekkai that his mother considered the tutor “a true gentleman.” Sekkai was surprised, as Saudi Arabia’s gender segregation had prevented him from meeting the mother, much less giving her a chance to assess his character. Then he realized that she had been watching him through the surveillance cameras on the walls.

That left him feeling self-conscious, but he pressed on. The boys did not make much progress in English, and into his late twenties, MBS avoided speaking the language in public. They made even less progress in French, which the princes’ mother requested that Sekkai add to the curriculum. But by the end of his tenure, Sekkai had grown fond of the spirited young MBS, years later recalling his “imposing personality.” Sekkai assumed it came from his status as the eldest of his mother’s sons and the attention his immediate family lavished on him.

“He was the admired figure, which gave him that sense of ‘I am in charge here,’” Sekkai said. “In that palace, he was the one that everybody looked after. He got the attention of everybody.”

MBS’s FATHER, SALMAN bin Abdulaziz, was a handsome, hardworking prince with jet black hair, a goatee, and a reputation for rectitude and toughness. When he traveled abroad, he sported suits with wide lapels and striped ties that invited comparisons to Wall Street bankers or characters from James Bond films. At home, he wore traditional, princely regalia and presided over the Saudi capital and surrounding areas as the governor of Riyadh. Residents joked that they could set their watches to the sight of his convoy heading to work in the morning, hours before other princes got out of bed. To run the capital, he kept tabs on the area’s tribes, clerics, and big clans—including his own. For years, he was the disciplinarian of the royal family. If a fight between royal cousins over a piece of real estate got out of hand, if a princess bailed on an astronomical hotel bill in Paris, if a prince got drunk and caused a scandal, it was Salman who would bring down the hammer, locking up egregious offenders in his own private jail.

“I have several princes in my prison at this moment,” he bragged to the British writer Robert Lacey. An American diplomat wrote that Salman had stopped one of his brothers from complaining about a new regulation by telling him to “shut up and get back to work.”

No one would play a greater role than Salman in propelling MBS’s rise.

Salman traversed the titanic changes that revolutionized life in Saudi Arabia during the 20th century. He was a scion of a dynasty that had twice failed to create a kingdom in central Arabia before succeeding so phenomenally that the desert-dwellers who had pioneered the idea would have had a hard time believing how it ended up.

In the mid-1700s, in a sunbaked oasis of mud houses and date palms, Salman’s ancestors had made the first attempt, when a chieftain named Mohammed Ibn Saud created the first Saudi proto-state around his home village of Diriyah. Mohammed was not from one of the major tribes that formed the primary social structure of Arabia at the time. Instead, the Al Saud were settled farmers who grew dates and invested in trade caravans.

Battles between tribes and clans were common, but Mohammed got an edge by forming an alliance with a fundamentalist cleric that underpinned how Arabia was ruled for generations to come. Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab preached that Islam had been corrupted by traditional Arabian practices such as the veneration of idols and trees. He called for a purification of the religion by rooting out “innovations” and returning to the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions centuries before. The sheikh’s views got him chased from his hometown, and he sought refuge in Diriyah, where the Al Saud bound his religious message to their political project.

The alliance benefited both parties. Backed by Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the Al Saud were no longer just another Arabian clan out for power, but crusaders for the one true faith. In exchange, they gave the sheikh and his descendants control over religious and social affairs. The alliance proved to be potent, and as the first Saudi state grew, those communities that refused the sheikh’s message were branded infidels who deserved the sword.

When the state’s territory expanded to include the Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina, the Ottomans struck back by sending troops that toppled the state, reduced Diriyah to rubble, and scattered the surviving members of the Al Saud. Their descendants tried to reestablish the state in the 19th century in the nearby town of Riyadh, but the effort collapsed in infighting over who should be in charge.

In the early 20th century, a descendent of the Al Saud named Abdulaziz—MBS’s grandfather—revived the campaign to conquer the land of his forefathers. He led troops on camelback and reestablished the alliance with the descendants of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, who provided religious justification for his rule. Over three decades, Abdulaziz brought much of Arabia under his control, ruling it from the new capital, Riyadh.

But the rise of this new, fundamentalist polity disconcerted the Western powers who were establishing themselves around the Persian Gulf, and King Abdulaziz faced a choice: to continue expansionary jihad, which would have invited conflict with the British, or to create a modern state. He chose the latter, and declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Saudi Arabia would most likely have remained a desert backwater of minor interest to the rest of the world had it not been for the discovery of oil in 1938. That attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies, and representatives of Western governments seeking access to the kingdom’s black gold, including the United States. In a secret meeting in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal, the two leaders hit it off, reaching a lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in exchange for American protection from foreign attacks. That arrangement became a pillar of American policy in the Middle East into the next century.

The influx of oil wealth turbocharged the inheritances from the kingdom’s history. The Saudis financed the international propagation of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab’s teachings, making Wahhabism a global religious force. Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil monopoly, became the world’s most valuable company—by far. The Al Saud became one of the world’s wealthiest dynasties. By the time of his death in 1953, King Abdulaziz had married at least eighteen women and fathered thirty-six sons and twenty-seven daughters. His offspring did not skimp on procreation either, expanding into a sprawling clan whose country bore their name and who enjoyed tremendous wealth and privilege.

There were thousands of them, all subsidized by the Saudi state. In 1996, an American diplomat visited the office that distributed their monthly stipends and found a stream of servants picking up their masters’ allowances, which varied based on their status. The sons and daughters of King Abdulaziz received up to $270,000, his grandchildren up to $27,000, and his great-grandchildren $13,000. The most distant relatives got $800. Princes also got million-dollar bonuses to build palaces when they got married, as well as perks for having children. The diplomat estimated that the stipends cost the state more than $2 billion per year, but that was merely a guess.

Much of that money trickled into society to earn the royals the loyalty of the population. One of Salman’s sons said he spent more than a million dollars of his own money during the holy month of Ramadan, hosting feasts for his subjects. But the royals still lived large, commanding fleets of yachts, building palaces from Los Angeles to Monaco, and taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms in the communities where they landed.

The royals were so numerous that they formed a micro-society that functioned according to its own rules, including deep discretion and a respect for seniority so ingrained that they memorized one another’s birthdays. That is what allowed them to shuffle into line from oldest to youngest at functions with the ease of geese forming a V to fly south for the winter.

The mud walls and ramparts of Diriyah, the oasis where it all began, still stand a short drive from Riyadh—now a modern capital of 8 million people, studded with malls, skyscrapers, and broad motorways.

It was there that Salman spent his life—and prepared his son for the future.

SALMAN WAS BORN three years after the foundation of Saudi Arabia and would recall later in life that when he was a child, his family had still lived in tents for part of the year. But by the time he was a young man, oil wealth had transformed the royals into palace-dwellers and players on the world stage.

The family respect for seniority shaped how the kingdom was ruled. After King Abdulaziz died in 1953, rule passed to a succession of his sons, from oldest to youngest, with some brothers skipped over because they did not want to rule or because the rest of the family deemed them unfit. (Women had no political prospects.) Under the king, the country was run by senior princes who shared the main portfolios: internal security, the military, the National Guard, and foreign affairs. They made major decisions by consensus.

Salman was the twenty-fifth of his father’s thirty-six sons, which put him so low in the royal pecking order that, for most of his life, the prospect of his becoming king was remote. There were simply too many others ahead of him in line. Nor was he put in charge of a powerful ministry that he could use to promote his sons. Instead, in his twenties, he was named the governor of Riyadh Province, a job he would hold for nearly fifty years as the city grew from a desert outpost to a metropolis.

Running Riyadh made him a key interface between the royals and society. He maintained relations with the tribes and knew their genealogies, rivalries, and histories. Riyadh was the largest city in the Wahhabi heartland, the region of Najd, and Salman often hosted the clerics in his court. But Salman’s main job was receiving subjects who appealed for help. Those with ailing relatives sought money for operations. Businessmen solicited contracts. Farmers came for mediation in land conflicts. Families with sons on death row appealed for intercession to prevent beheadings.

Over the years, Salman fathered an impressive brood. His first wife, Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, hailed from a prominent family and bore him five sons and a daughter. The eldest, Fahd, attended universities in California and Arizona and got involved in British horseracing, which familiarized him with the West. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Fahd spoke often with the Western reporters who flooded into the kingdom to cover the war.

The next son, Sultan, was a colonel in the Saudi Air Force who became the first Arab and the first Muslim to go to space, on the shuttle Discovery in 1985. He loved skiing, ran the kingdom’s tourism commission, and was so fond of the United States that he once told an American diplomat, “Some of the best days of my life were in the U.S.”

Next was Ahmed, who studied at the Colorado School of Mines and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy before also joining the Air Force. He later attended the University of California, Irvine, and served as the chairman of the family’s media company. In 2002, he caused a horseracing upset by buying the thoroughbred War Emblem for $900,000 three weeks before it won the Kentucky Derby. Acquaintances recalled him as “an elegant man with clipped mustache and pocket handkerchief, unexpectedly casual for a member of Saudi royalty.”

The next son, Abdulaziz, was a rare royal to work in the kingdom’s oil sector, where he championed efforts to modernize the industry and was later named energy minister.

The youngest of Sultana’s sons, Faisal, earned a PhD from Oxford, was a research fellow at Georgetown, founded a Saudi investment company, Jadwa, and also had a taste for thoroughbreds.

Salman’s first wife had one daughter, Hassa, who worked with the kingdom’s human rights commission and later ran into legal trouble in France after a plumber accused her of ordering her bodyguard to kill him.

At some point, Sultana developed a kidney ailment that worsened over time, leaving her surrounded by doctors and sending her frequently abroad for treatment. So Salman married Fahda bint Falah Al Hathleen, a short woman from a prominent tribe who would bear him six more sons. (Salman also had a short marriage to a third woman that produced one son, Saud.)

Fahda’s eldest son was Mohammed bin Salman, born August 31, 1985.

As a prince, MBS grew up steeped in inherited and unearned privilege, socializing in palaces, shuttled about in convoys, and fussed over by nannies, tutors, and retainers. Only close friends and relatives called him by his name. To everyone else, he was tal omrak, short for “May God prolong your life,” or “Your Royal Highness.” But if his father was far down the royal pecking order, MBS was even farther. As the sixth son of the twenty-fifth son of the founding king, there was little reason to expect that he would rise to prominence. And for most of his life, few people did.

MBS later said that his father oversaw the education of him and his siblings, assigning each child a book each week and then quizzing them on it. His mother brought in intellectuals to lead discussions and sent her children on educational field trips. Both parents were strict. Showing up late for lunch with his father was “a disaster.” His mother was harsh, too.

“My brothers and I used to think, ‘Why is our mother treating us this way?’ She would never overlook any of the mistakes we made,” he said.

He later concluded that such scrutiny made him stronger.

MBS has rarely spoken publicly about his youth, nor have others who knew him at the time. That makes it hard to paint a detailed picture of his early life. Exacerbating the challenge is the power he would wield later, guaranteeing that public utterances about him would be complimentary and that anything scandalous would be buried. But to get a sense of where he came from, I have spent the last few years tracking down Saudis and others who knew or crossed paths with him in his youth. Most still live or have relatives or business in the kingdom and so spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves.

Salman lived with his first wife near the Royal Court in a palace with a white-columned façade; people jokingly called it “the White House.” MBS’s mother and her children lived elsewhere, but she had ambitions for them that could be achieved only through their father, so she packed them off frequently for lunch at “the White House” so they could be close to him. But MBS and his brothers were not warmly welcomed by Sultana, who looked down on the children of the second wife for their tribal background (and probably out of jealously toward their younger, healthier mother). She did not hide her contempt, which her children sometimes echoed, making fun of MBS while leading jet-setting lives and filling their résumés with businesses and foreign degrees.

MBS’s trajectory was profoundly different—largely domestic and deeply Saudi. But through his teens, he was mostly lost in the crowd of royals, with few obvious ways to elevate his standing. That would change because of two series of deaths in the family.

IN 2001, SALMAN’S oldest son, Fahd, who had helped out reporters during the Gulf War, died suddenly at age 46. A year later, his brother Ahmed, the Kentucky Derby winner, died, too, at age 44. The declared cause in both cases was heart attack, but the underlying reasons were never made clear.

The sudden, untimely deaths of two sons threw Salman into deep mourning. While his older children were off pursuing careers and taking care of their own families, MBS, then 16, stuck close to his father in his time of pain, deepening the bond between them. MBS’s mother pressed Salman to spend more time with MBS, and the young prince often shadowed his father as he ran the Saudi capital as governor. It was an immersive education in the state of the kingdom, as MBS saw who came and went, learning who mattered in which tribe, which clerics held which positions, which businessmen had tapped which parts of the economy, and which royals had found innovative ways to rip off the state.

One member of the family’s entourage during that time recalled that MBS’s social life centered around using his royal privilege to build bonds with the people. In the summer, his family would decamp for the Red Sea coast, where MBS would rent a fleet of Jet Skis for the young men. In the winter, they would set up camp in the desert, where MBS would have the biggest camp, serve roast lambs on huge platters of rice, and keep fleets of buggies for the Bedouin who dropped by to greet the royals. MBS’s world was Saudi Arabia, and he seemed to love it as much as his cousins loved London, Geneva, or Monaco. His father appreciated his fondness for the kingdom, and their bond grew stronger, as MBS accompanied him at weddings and funerals and prayed near him at the mosque.

MBS’s mother and her children eventually moved into their own mansion, and some summers, Salman would vacation at a palace built by his brother, the late King Fahd, in Marbella with his first wife and her children, then pop in to see his second wife’s family in Barcelona. Later, MBS’s mother would take over a portion of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, shunning its French cuisine for Saudi food prepared by cooks she brought from home.

In his teens, MBS developed a reputation for misbehaving. Fellow royals and others who knew him say he seemed frustrated and angry, erupting at times in fits of rage. At least once, he dressed up as a police officer and went to an outdoor mall area in Riyadh to show off. The actual police officers could do little because they knew he was the governor’s son.

Accompanying his father immersed MBS in contemporary Arabia, but he was also a son of the twenty-first century. As with many Saudis of his generation, his sense of the rest of the world was shaped by Hollywood movies, American and Japanese cartoons, and social media. Old friends said he would sometimes lose himself in videogames and was the first in his circle to become addicted to Facebook.

MBS was 16 when the hijackers dispatched by Osama bin Laden attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. He told a delegation of Americans years later that his mother had called him to see the news and he had reached the television just in time to watch the second plane crash into the south tower of the World Trade Center. While MBS did not want his comments during that meeting to be directly quoted, the delegation’s head, Joel. C. Rosenberg, told me his impression was that MBS recalled feeling a sense of horror that the world was going to hate Islam because of the attacks and that it would be harder for Saudis to feel comfortable abroad.

That feeling may have affected how he ruled later on.

“I think he grew up deciding,” Rosenberg told me, “‘I don’t want to live in a country that the world thinks of this way, and that I think of this way, and I’m going to hunt down anyone who could think up something like this or who could lead us to be perceived as a backward, crazy country.’”

Instead of going abroad for university, MBS stayed in Riyadh and studied law at King Saud University. One of his classmates said it appeared even then that he wanted to be a leader, directing discussions among friends and once telling a group that he wanted to be the next Alexander the Great. Another prince of the same generation would see MBS at weekly dinners their uncle, Prince Sultan, hosted for his nephews.

“He always talked about the government and how he wanted to get involved and what he wanted to change, but I thought he was just saying that because he was the son of the governor of Riyadh,” the prince recalled. “He always wanted to be the one speaking. He always wanted to be in the lead.”

He was also into Margaret Thatcher.

“He always enjoyed talking about the Iron Lady and how she enhanced the economic system of Great Britain,” the prince said.

But MBS remained far off the radars of the foreign diplomats and experts who studied royal dynamics to anticipate who might come to power in the future. In 2007, the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia visited Salman, who asked for help with U.S. visas for his family. His first wife had trouble traveling to see her doctor, and although Salman’s other children put up with the stringent application process, MBS “refused to go to the U.S. Embassy to be fingerprinted ‘like some criminal.’”

MBS graduated from university fourth in his class in 2007 and spent two years working for the Bureau of Experts, a research body for the Saudi Cabinet. After two years, he was due for a promotion but King Abdullah blocked it, so he returned to work for his father. He married a cousin, a petite princess named Sarah bint Mashour, and celebrated at a luxurious hall in Riyadh.

To outsiders, all Saudi royals appeared wealthy, but inside the family, there were vast gradations, and MBS was, yet again, far from the top. His father was well known, but MBS realized during his teens that compared to other senior royals his father had no fortune. As he moved into adulthood, the differences in wealth began to burn, as his cousins descended on European capitals with fleets of luxury cars and entourages that took over entire hotels. The cash wielded by some royals was mind-blowing, enabling them to vacuum up fancy homes and field house calls from Harrods salesmen with chests of jewelry for their wives and daughters. They gave thousand-dollar tips to bellboys, passed out $100,000 stacks of cash to their entourages if they happened to land near a casino, and could drop $400,000 on watches during a single shop visit.

Part of what the royals paid for was protection from public scrutiny of their lifestyles and spending habits, but details often leaked out. Marbella, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, was a favorite summertime destination, and royal cash drove a high-end economy. Some threw banquets with lamb, shellfish, and caviar that cost as much as $1,000 a head. Bloated hotel bills were further inflated with rented yachts, helicopters, and private jets. Most royals behaved well in public, but hospitality workers noted that many indulged pleasures in Spain that they had to forgo at home, such as alcohol, pork, and all-night parties.

“In the early hours of the morning, it appears the corridors of some hotels look more like catwalks for fashion models,” a local journalist wrote.

Sometimes, scandals drew attention to royal excesses. One princess, Maha al-Sudairi, left behind nearly $20 million in unpaid bills in Paris, including nearly $400,000 to a luxury car service and $100,000 to a lingerie store. Three years later, she was back and tried to slip away without paying a $7 million bill at the Shangri-La Hotel, where she and her entourage had occupied forty-one rooms for five months. The next year, her son celebrated his graduation by booking entire sections of Disneyland Paris, where his dozens of guests were entertained by rare Disney characters. The bill for the three-day blowout came to $19.5 million.

MBS didn’t have that kind of money, but he began playing the Saudi stock market as a teenager. Once he entered his twenties, he dabbled in business to build his wealth.

Real estate had long been an easy way to generate princely wealth, and MBS tried that, too. MBS clearly managed to make some money. A retired diplomat recalled asking a luxury car dealer around 2011 about the market for high-end rides.

The dealer broke it down.

The lower princes bought Porsches or BMWs.

The next level up got Maseratis or Ferraris.

The big spenders purchased Bugattis, which cost a few million dollars each.

“Who buys those?” the diplomat asked.

“I just sold one to this guy called Mohammed bin Salman,” the dealer said.

The diplomat had never heard of him.

“He’s the governor’s kid.”

But during MBS’s mid-twenties, there was still little reason to expect that he would become more than a middling prince who dabbled in business and pitched up abroad now and then for a fancy vacation. Then a second series of deaths in the family vaulted his father up the ladder—and MBS with him.

IN JULY 2011, Salman’s first wife lost her long battle with kidney disease and passed away. His full brother, Prince Sultan, who was next in line to the throne, suffered from cancer, and Salman stayed with him in New York until he died later that year. Another brother, Prince Nayef, became the crown prince, but he had coronary heart disease and died in 2012. King Abdullah then named Salman the new crown prince, and suddenly MBS’s father was next in line to the throne and well positioned to empower his favorite son.

MBS has never publicly discussed when he began plotting his political career, but he has talked about his desire to be a new kind of ruler, one who disrupted the old order like the giants of Silicon Valley, instead of one who followed the traditional ways.

“There’s a big difference,” he said. “The first, he can create Apple. The second can become a successful employee. I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.”

King Abdullah, however, saw MBS as an upstart whose experience fell far short of his ambitions. He named Salman minister of defense, but barred MBS from joining his father in the ministry. The king later relented to Salman’s request and named MBS the head of the crown prince’s court and the director of his father’s office at the ministry, a cabinet-level position.

Much still remains unclear about how MBS spent his twenties, largely because he did so little that drew attention at the time and because so much effort would later go into retroactively polishing his reputation. But what is clear is everything MBS did not do before he burst onto the scene in 2015. He never ran a company that made a mark. He never acquired military experience. He never studied at a foreign university. He never mastered, or even become functional in, a foreign language. He never spent significant time in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the West.

That background would shape how he wielded power later on. His deep understanding of the kingdom and its society would enable him to successfully execute moves that few thought possible before he pulled them off. But his lack of experience with the West gave him weak instincts for how allies, particularly the United States, functioned and thought—a blind spot that would frequently lead him to miscalculate how they would view his riskier gambits.

The drastically different backgrounds of MBS and his older, more experienced half brothers poses the question of why his father chose MBS to follow in his footsteps. Salman has never publicly explained his choice, and as an absolute monarch, will never have to. So we are left with little more than informed speculation.

Salman may have shared the views of his own father, the kingdom’s founder, who had rejected the suggestion by an American businessman that he educate his sons abroad.

“In order to be a leader of men, a man has to receive an education in his own country, among his own people, and to grow up in surroundings steeped with the traditions and psychology of his countrymen,” King Abdulaziz said.

That jibed with the theories of two close associates of the Salman family who spoke to me on the condition that I not identify them.

One felt that the older brothers, with their foreign educations, British accents, and horse ranches, had lost touch with their father, who, in the end, was a Saudi traditionalist who liked the desert and eating meat with his hands. So did MBS, and his father appreciated it.

The other said that although MBS’s rough style grated on many of his relatives, it never bothered his father, who may have seen in the young prince a toughness he felt the kingdom needed going forward.

The associate summed up the thinking this way: “To deal with a Bedouin, I need a Bedouin.”

IN THE SPRING of 2014, Joseph Westphal arrived in Riyadh as President Obama’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Then 66, Westphal had led a career that moved back and forth between academia and government, working at a number of universities and serving for a spell as the acting secretary of the army. He was a tall, large, avuncular man whose back-slapping style annoyed more hard-driving members of the administration. But it worked well with the Saudis, who appreciated that he liked to chat before getting down to business.

As Westphal settled into his post, someone showed him an old video of Salman getting a tour of some public facility—a factory, or a water treatment plant—elsewhere in the Middle East. Salman was dressed like “a Wall Street banker,” Westphal recalled, and made sure that those giving the tour explained everything to his son, who jotted down copious notes on a small pad.

That was MBS, and Westphal was intrigued.

“There is something very special about this young guy,” he thought. “There was no question that he was the apple of his father’s eye.”

King Abdullah was busy and often ill, so Westphal frequently visited Salman and noticed MBS, usually standing to the side but never speaking. So Westphal requested a meeting with the young prince and got the impression that MBS was excited, because no one as prominent as a U.S. ambassador had ever asked to meet him before.

The two men hit it off, chatting about their families and backgrounds, and the ambassador became convinced that the young man was off to do big things.

“I did believe from the very beginning that this was a young, ambitious guy who was destined to be a leader,” Westphal recalled later. “And he had the platform.”

ARRIVALS

I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT these royal machinations when I made my first visit to Saudi Arabia in 2013. I had recently been hired as a Middle East correspondent for The New York Times after living and working in the region for seven years. I spoke and read Arabic, lived in Lebanon, and had reported in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, giving me a broad understanding of the region’s dynamics. But Saudi Arabia was a black hole, its murky politics dominated by men in identical white robes with seemingly interchangeable names, its society opaque, reduced in most writing to generalities about the birthplace of Islam and outrage over the treatment of women.

I had grown used to hearing Arabs blame Saudi Arabia for all manner of ills, from the rise of particular political parties or trends, to funding or inspiring terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, to the spread of social conservatism. But the mechanics of Saudi influence seemed invisible, as if the kingdom’s power emanated across the Middle East at some subsonic frequency that affected everything but remained inaudible to the naked ear.

For the next five years, my assignment was to figure the place out. During dozens of visits to the kingdom and trips to many of its provinces, I met and got to know hundreds of Saudis from different parts of society: clerics who thought the kingdom was the best place on earth; young people who longed to escape; princes and princesses who were oblivious to their privilege; women who wanted to drive; women who could not care less about driving; and others who were proud to be Saudi even if they wished the place would lighten up a bit.

Over that time, I wrote hundreds of articles exploring Saudi politics, foreign policy, culture, and religion. I saw remote historic sites. I watched horse races at the king’s track. I met the Grand Mufti, the top religious authority, who told me to become a Muslim. And I made friends with a range of Saudis who helped me understand how they saw their homeland and where they wanted it to go. But it was my early visits to the kingdom that showed me the old Saudi Arabia, giving me benchmarks I could use after MBS showed up and tried to change everything.

In 2013, I checked in to an old-fashioned hotel downtown that had large, framed pictures of the king, the crown prince, and the founding king, Abdulaziz, in the lobby. All the employees were men, from India, Pakistan, and other Arab countries. The only Saudis in sight were men in white robes who were always reading newspapers in the lobby. Why were they there? Were they secret police, keeping an eye on who was meeting whom? Or did they just like the ambience? I never knew.

My room looked as if the wallpaper had been hung in the 1970s and the carpet laid before that. There was a speaker next to my bed that I could turn on to get the call to prayer piped in five times a day. Not that I needed it. There were so many mosques around that I could hear the call clearly, even with the window closed. On Friday afternoon, the city shut down for communal prayers and the sermons were so loud that I could follow them word for word inside my room.

I didn’t know anyone, so I reported to a functionary at the Ministry of Culture and Information who dealt with foreign press. I began to tell him about the articles I hoped to report, but he cut me off, saying that I should have sent him a fax with my “program” a month in advance. Since I had not, he could not help.

“I am very sorry,” he said, not sounding very sorry at all.

He served me tea in a plastic cup.

“Enjoy your time in Saudi Arabia.”

I had a list of phone numbers I had inherited from colleagues who had covered the kingdom before, so I got to work, cold-calling Saudis to ask for meetings. Most were surprisingly welcoming, offering to meet me at my hotel or sending their drivers to bring me to their homes or offices. There was nothing secretive about it, and the newspaper guys in the lobby never seemed to care. At that time, Saudis had no reason to worry about speaking to a foreign journalist.

The kingdom was clearly wealthy, and many of the Saudis I met seemed to have a lot of money without doing a lot of work. But it was also shabbier than I expected, with perpetual roadwork snarling highways and poor lighting as soon as one left the main drag. At the time, the kingdom was at the end of a ten-year bender, during which oil prices had remained high, piping cash into the government, which trickled down to everyone else. Had there been no oil, there would have been almost no economic activity whatsoever.

Non-Saudis did most visible jobs. Foreigners made up about one-third of the kingdom’s population, and they did the economy’s heavy lifting. Checking in to a hotel, one was likely to meet an Egyptian or an Indian. Take a taxi and the driver was often Afghan. Construction sites were packed with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. The professional class was full of Arabs, with engineers, managers, accountants, and doctors from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. A smaller number of Westerners worked in banks, large firms, the oil industry, or as advisers to wealthy royals.

I was struck by the kingdom’s conservatism and how Wahhabism shaped every aspect of life. In public, nearly all women wore baggy black gowns called “abayas” that hid their forms, turning them into billowing black figures, indistinguishable but for the high heels or tennis shoes poking out below. Nearly all covered their hair, and most covered their faces, leaving only thin slits for their eyes. Mixing between unrelated men and women was forbidden, and to prevent it, restaurants were divided into sections for “families,” where related men and women could sit together, and for “singles,” who were all men. I would learn that many Saudis mixed in private, and men and women could usually meet in hotel lobbies with little problem. Others did not want to mix and saw gender segregation as part of their culture. In some conservative circles, men went their whole lives without seeing the faces of women other than their immediate relatives—even their brothers’ wives.

Shops and restaurants shut their doors when the call to prayer sounded, even if their proprietors hung out in the back and killed time on their phones instead of going to the mosque. They had little choice but to shut their doors, to avoid the wrath of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the so-called “religious police.” Its stern, bearded fellows patrolled public areas to harass women whose clothes were deemed not concealing enough and to seek out those drinking, doing drugs, or engaging in unsanctioned ikhtilat, or “mixing,” with the opposite sex. Local news sites reported when they stormed a basement where Indian Christians were holding a covert church service (the kingdom banned the practice of any religion other than Islam), or when they broke up a birthday party where young Saudi men engaged in “inappropriate dancing” (birthday celebrations were considered un-Islamic).

That meant there was not much to do. In fact, it was excruciatingly boring. No movies. No music. Few parks. I felt cooped up in my room, and so walked to the mall for a change of scenery, but was not allowed in because it was “family time” and I was a single male. So I sat outside and watched young Saudi guys try to glom on to visiting families to sneak inside, where they might see some girls. I tried to work in coffee shops, but got kicked out when prayer time came. Once, I took a seat outside and a policeman tried to hustle me off to the mosque.

Since there were so few public places for young men to hang out, they pooled their money to rent simple salons where they could gather to talk, drink tea, and watch television. Before I got there, the more daring would steal cars and engage in a unique kind of Saudi drifting called “tafheet” that birthed its own subversive subculture. Like rave organizers, the drifters organized pop-up events where drivers entertained crowds with risky car tricks. Filling out the scene, poets praised their favorite drivers, who competed to expand their entourages. It was dangerous and illegal, but exhilarating, like drag racing during the James Dean era, and it gave the city’s underclass, who had benefited little from the kingdom’s wealth, a way to push back. But by the time I got to Riyadh, the government had plastered the city with surveillance cameras so the police could shut down the drifters before they got going.

Young women had even fewer options, so they mostly met up in homes or went out to eat. There was lots of fast food, and lots of eating. But if the ladies’ drivers were occupied and no male relatives could drop them off, they stayed home.

A few days after I arrived, there was a driving protest, although the organizers insisted that it was not a protest, because the government hated protests. Small groups of women had been challenging the driving ban now and then for decades, and a group of activists had chosen October 26, 2013, for their next campaign. The idea was simple: Women who had legal foreign licenses would drive and post videos of themselves online to show that it was not a big deal.

But news of the non-protest got out and conservative forces mobilized to remind the kingdom of the perils of women behind the wheel. One religious scholar on TV blasted the activists as “a great danger” whose goals were “suspicious and threaten the homeland.” The clerics had banned women from driving, he said, “because of the political, religious, social, and economic problems it entails” which could “open the door to evil.” Another cleric led a delegation of more than a hundred men from around the kingdom to warn King Abdullah about “the conspiracy of women driving.”

As the big day approached, hackers defaced the women’s website, filling it with insults and posting a video by an Israeli-American activist calling on women to drive and sarcastically accusing “Zionists” of using the issue to weaken the kingdom. The government warned that it forbade all that “disturbs the social peace, opens the door to discord, and responds to the fantasies of those with sick dreams among the biased ones, the intruders, and the predators.” The security forces would respond “with all force and determination,” it said, to punish anyone who sought “to split and divide society.” Security officials called the activists to tell them to stay home.

But on the day of, some still drove. The organizers said they received videos from dozens of women, but it was hard to know how many there were, and in any case, it was minuscule in a country with 22 million citizens. I got the feeling that day that there were more foreign journalists looking for women drivers than there were drivers to be found.

But the videos were charming. One showed a young woman grinning as she sped through Riyadh, giggling as her father filmed her from the passenger seat.

“This is Loujain Al-Hathloul who just arrived in Riyadh and is on her way home. She is driving and happy,” he said. “God willing, after ten years we will laugh at this image.”

I spoke to a number of the participants. One was a 60-year-old photographer and psychoanalyst named Madeha Alajroush, who told me the women’s request for an audience with King Abdullah had been turned down. That annoyed her, since it seemed like clerics got to see the king whenever they wanted. All she wanted was to drive herself to a café.

“We are looking for a normal way of life, for me to get into my car and do something as small as get myself a cappuccino or something as grand as taking my child to the emergency room,” she told me.

On the morning of, her driver took her to a Costa Coffee, where she was to meet a friend to drive with. But two men were following them, so they aborted the mission, sought refuge in a mall, and bought a yellow toy car, which they presented to the men as a gift. The men stormed off.

The hubbub surrounding the issue bugged her.

“This is not a revolution,” she told me.

I also spoke with a linguistics professor at a Riyadh university, Eman Al Nafjan, who wrote a blog about Saudi women. She didn’t have a license, so she filmed other women as they drove. But she did own a car, a beige Ford, and she explained her transportation setup.

“There is a little room outside my house, and in that little room is a little Bangladeshi guy,” she said. “He drives me around.”

I laughed, and she laughed, too.

“That’s Saudi for you,” she said.

In the coming years those three women and their quest to drive would collide with MBS’s rise in unexpected ways.

By the end of the day, no women had been jailed, society had not collapsed, and the biggest news ended up being a music video posted on YouTube by a group of Saudi artists. To the tune of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” they sang an a cappella version that urged “no woman, no drive.”

“I remember when you used to sit, in the family car, but backseat …”

They mocked a cleric who argued that driving damaged women’s reproductive organs.

“Ova-ovaries are safe and well, so you can make lots and lots of babies.”

It was funny and went viral, its criticism so clever that it didn’t enflame tempers or get anyone arrested.

“Heeeeeeey, little sister, don’t touch that wheel! No woman, no drive!”

That was one of many incidents during my early visits that made it clear that the kingdom was bursting with young people who were branched in to the outside world through entertainment and social media and who saw the kingdom in drastically different ways than their elders.

I kept meeting young Saudis who challenged my assumptions of what it meant to be “liberal” or “conservative.” One religious man I got to know sported a long beard and no mustache, the signs of a salafi, a hyper-conservative who imitated the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from centuries before. I once caught him reading Hillary Clinton’s autobiography.

“You don’t even believe women should be in politics, right?” I asked.

True, he said, but irrelevant.

“She’s an important figure and I want to know how she thinks,” he said.

The next time I saw him, he was reading The Da Vinci Code.

I asked what he thought.

Its history was bogus, he said, but he didn’t care. “Great story!”

I made friends with a judge whose day job was applying Sharia law. We met to discuss an article I was reporting, but when we paused for tea, he leaned in and asked, “Do you watch Breaking Bad?”

As I got to know him, he confided that for vacation, he liked to take his wife and daughter to California, where they would rent a car and drive around Hollywood. He had effectively been drafted into the judiciary after university and was trying to get out, which was not easy. I wondered what life he would have chosen had he been able to.

The mantra in King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia, repeated ad nauseam by government officials and Saudi academics, was “evolution, not revolution.” The kingdom was politically stable, as far as anyone knew, and the old king was a reformer, in his way. He had lifted regulations to allow women to enter the workforce; appointed a group of women to the Shura Council, a royal advisory body; and vowed to let women vote and run in municipal elections. Most Saudis welcomed those changes but were keenly aware of the chaos that the Arab Spring uprisings had unleashed in neighboring countries. That made them happy to take it slow and leave governance to the royals, as long as they kept paying the bills.

But building quietly was a looming challenge to the monarchy. As the younger sons of the founding king grew old and died, it was not clear who would take over once they were gone. The throne would eventually have to pass to the next generation, but how? The third generation contained thousands of princes, so who would choose from among them?

In 2009, a well-known Saudi journalist who had spent decades with kings and princes and had a good feel for royal dynamics laid out the issue to an American diplomat.

The kingdom was “a country in transition,” the journalist said, facing tough questions about its future. Within ten years, he predicted, Saudi Arabia would have a young ruler from the “new generation.” The problem was, “No one knows who this will be.”

The journalist’s name was Jamal Khashoggi.

He was right.

CORONATION

ON JANUARY 23, 2015, King Abdullah succumbed to a long bout with lung cancer and died in the National Guard Hospital in Riyadh. One of his sons emerged from the emergency room to inform relatives and courtiers that the king had passed, and many broke into tears. As word spread through the kingdom, princes from other branches of the family passed by to pay their condolences. Among them was Salman, who arrived with Mohammed bin Salman. At some point, the young prince took the seal used on Royal Court documents from the powerful man who had run it under King Abdullah, an early sign of who would be in charge going forward. The royal guards who had brought Abdullah to the hospital left with Salman. Abdullah was laid to rest in a simple grave and Salman became Saudi Arabia’s new king. He was 79, one of the last surviving sons of King Abdulaziz, and the last of his generation to rule the kingdom.

Despite the jubilation in Saudi Arabia at the ascension of a new monarch, with celebratory programs flooding the television stations and green fireworks bursting over Riyadh, it was a troubling time for the kingdom. The popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring had shaken the regional order the Saudis were used to by toppling autocrats in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and Egypt. Their departure had left behind a murky picture of who would wield power where and how they would relate to the kingdom.

A new, Saudi-backed dictator had taken charge in Egypt, but the Arab world’s most populous country faced an economic crisis. Libya was in chaos, with two competing forces seeking to impose their rule on a shell-shocked country. Scrappy rebels known as the Houthis had seized control of northwestern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and territory along the Saudi border. Farther afield, a brutal civil war raged in Syria, where Saudi support had failed to help rebels oust a Saudi foe, President Bashar al-Assad.

In the meantime, the jihadists of the Islamic State had rampaged through eastern Syria and western Iraq, seizing territory the size of Britain, using phenomenal violence to terrify enemies, and declaring the creation of a caliphate, or an Islamic government they hoped would unite the world’s Muslims. In reality, most of the world’s Muslims, including the Saudi leadership, abhorred the jihadists, but their rise posed challenges for the kingdom. It drew unflattering attention to Saudi Arabia’s own intolerant interpretation of Islam, which also shunned “infidels” and practiced public beheading. There were significant differences: Wahhabism did not call for the establishment of the caliphate, encouraged obedience to rulers, and did not oppose interactions with the West. But the similarities on most religious matters were so great that the jihadists used Saudi textbooks in their schools. Nevertheless, the jihadists blasted the royal family as hypocrites and sellouts while recruiting thousands of Saudis to their ranks, some of whom launched deadly attacks inside the kingdom.

At the same time, Iran was taking advantage of the chaos across the region to increase its influence through covert support for militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and Iran were competing lodestars for Islam’s two largest sects. The Sunni kingdom considered itself a Vatican of sorts for the world’s Muslims and saw Iran’s Shiite faith as an aberration. For its part, Iran, ruled by a revolutionary Shiite government, saw Saudi Arabia as a prime adversary in its quest to export its revolution and undermine American and Israeli interests.

Sapping Saudi Arabia’s ability to confront these threats, the global oil price had begun a precipitous decline that would keep it well below $100 per barrel for years to come. That sapped the kingdom’s budget, giving it not only less money to throw at its problems, but also damaging its economy. The country was overflowing with young people who had grown up during the oil boom and had high expectations, but the government could no longer employ them the way it had their elders.

Further exacerbating the kingdom’s fears was a sense that the United States, on whom it had relied for its security since President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz during World War II, was not as loyal as the Saudis hoped. The Saudi leadership did not like or trust President Barack Obama, and had little reason to believe that he liked them much either. They had grown angry with him in 2011 for saying that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt should leave power amid mass protests against his rule. Their frustrations grew when Obama did not provide more support to the rebels in Syria and declined to bomb President al-Assad after he used chemical weapons on his people in 2013, a tactic that Obama had previously declared a “red line.” They then learned that the Obama administration had engaged in intensive negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. The talks had been kept secret from the Saudis, solidifying the feeling that they had been betrayed by their most important ally.

As these challenges mounted, Salman ascended to the throne, with MBS in tow. Few Saudi watchers knew much about the young prince at the time.

Salman put in place a new royal lineup, elevating to crown prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, a younger half brother whom King Abdullah had placed in the line of succession. Muqrin had an impressive background, having trained at a British air force academy and held a number of governorships before serving as the head of Saudi intelligence. Foreign officials who worked with him suspected that he owed his later prominence to King Abdullah’s fondness for him. Muqrin was a raconteur and joke-teller, and King Abdullah had liked having him around. He was the youngest surviving son of King Abdulaziz, but his mother was a Yemeni concubine, which normally would have disqualified him from becoming king.

Salman also appointed as second in line to the throne Mohammed bin Nayef, a nephew and head of the Interior Ministry, who was best known for spearheading the kingdom’s campaign against Al Qaeda. The elevation made MBN, as he was known, the first of the grandsons of King Abdulaziz to be directly in the line of succession.

While most of the attention was focused on the well-known royals filling the top jobs, 29-year-old MBS stepped out of the shadows. Salman named him minister of defense, giving him oversight of the military, and put him in charge of the Royal Court, which gave him control over access to his father and the royal purse strings. MBS would leverage both jobs to increase his power.

MBS and his aides would later describe how they got to work immediately to confront what they recognized as a looming crisis born of low oil prices and exacerbated by poor management under the previous monarch. From 2010 to 2014, when oil prices were high and as King Abdullah’s health declined, constraints on government spending had fallen away, with increasingly large contracts slipping through with little or no scrutiny.

After King Abdullah died, MBS pulled together four advisers, who worked through the night to come up with a plan to restructure the government—and begin centralizing power under MBS. The next day, MBS ordered up a royal decree that abolished a range of government bodies and replaced them with two supreme councils, one for economic development, the other for security. MBS took charge of the first, giving him vast powers over the kingdom’s economy. He would later take over the second.

“From the first twelve hours, decisions were issued,” MBS said later. “In the first ten days, the entire government was restructured.”

One of MBS’s economic advisers later estimated that between $80 billion and $100 billion, or one-quarter of the Saudi budget, had been lost every year to inefficient spending. In the first few months of Salman’s rule, when the low oil price forced the kingdom to dig into its reserves to pay the bills, MBS’s team discovered that that trajectory would leave them “completely broke” in two years. The gravity of the looming crisis put the adviser “on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.”

Over the course of that first year, MBS would slim the government budget, reimpose spending controls, and take other measures to slow the kingdom’s race toward insolvency. But old habits died hard. Less than a month into his reign, King Salman decreed the payout of a two-month salary bonus to every government employee, soldier, and university student at home and abroad as part of a vast spending package estimated at $32 billion—more than the annual budget of Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. For a leadership that would make fiscal responsibility a central talking point, it was a bald bid for popularity through royal largesse.

The naming of MBS as the minister of defense did not immediately draw much attention, because the Saudi military had little history of fighting wars. Instead, it had served to employ large numbers of Saudi men and enabled princes to sign massive weapons contracts with the United States and other Western countries to underpin alliances and enrich networks of middlemen.

MBS saw little reason not to put the military to work. On March 26, he ordered the Saudi Air Force to start bombing Yemen, the kingdom’s poor, dysfunctional southern neighbor, in an effort to drive out the Houthi rebels who had taken over the capital and restore the government they had toppled. Senior U.S. officials received little notice that the intervention was coming before Saudi officials asked if they could count on American support. Saudi diplomats, including Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, flew to foreign capitals to convince the kingdom’s allies that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. That prediction turned out to be woefully off-base, and the war in Yemen was an early sign that MBS would take a new, hands-on approach to the region.

More royal decrees followed. One changed the name of the Yemen operation from “Decisive Storm” to “Restoring Hope,” a linguistic switch to suggest that the heavy lifting was over and it was now time to mop up. The king also removed Muqrin, the noted raconteur, as crown prince, saying it had been at his request, and replaced him with Mohammed bin Nayef, the esteemed security chief. The move was well-received in Washington because MBN had coordinated with the United States on security and was close to the Central Intelligence Agency.

MBS also moved up. His father named him deputy crown prince, putting him second in line to the throne, and made him the head of the board that oversaw Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s economic crown jewel.

Had a figure as unknown as MBS come to power so swiftly in the United States and immediately restructured the government and launched a new war, there would have been a scramble for information about him. Newspapers would have dug into his background, tracking down old friends, acquaintances, and bosses while seeking out the details of his personal life and financial dealings. In Saudi Arabia, none of this happened. The king had chosen his son, and it was the citizens’ job to praise him, not to question his qualifications.

The Saudi news media published profiles with scant details about MBS’s past: his stint as a government researcher, his jobs under his father, his positions with youth and heritage organizations. No one publicly questioned his qualifications to oversee the oil industry or the military. Foreign officials knew even less. For months, even his age was unclear. Publications, including The New York Times, repeatedly said he was “believed to be about 30.” Politico noted that he was “something of a mystery to U.S. leaders, but he serves as the Saudi defense minister and has a hawkish reputation. He is believed to be King Salman’s favorite son and often is referred to as ‘MbS.’”

IT WAS NOT long after his elevation to deputy crown prince that Washington got its first glimpse of MBS. In May 2015, the leaders of the Gulf Arab monarchies came to Washington for a summit at Camp David with President Obama. It was an awkward visit, not least because of the rustic conditions. American presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had slipped away to the rural Maryland retreat to host high-profile dignitaries far from the hubbub of the capital. That history meant little to the Gulf royals, who were accustomed to palaces and luxury hotels. Sleeping in rustic cabins, walking dirt trails, and riding through forests on golf carts was not their idea of a good time. And relations were already sour, due to Obama’s push for the nuclear agreement with Iran. The Americans were well aware of the Gulf leaders’ bruised egos, so the meet-up was designed to reassure them that the United States remained committed to their security.

Although he had been expected to attend, King Salman stayed home, but he sent both MBN and MBS, and Obama welcomed them in the Oval Office before the summit. It was the first time top members of the Obama administration met MBS, and a number of them recalled that he appeared uncomfortable and out of place. He spoke little, deferring to his older cousin, who was comfortable in English and was used to such situations. When Obama addressed MBS in English to bring him into the conversation, the young prince responded nervously through an Arabic translator.

But right after the meeting, Adel al-Jubeir, who had been promoted to foreign minister, asked Susan Rice, the national security adviser, for a private meeting with MBS. She agreed, and they met in Rice’s office, where MBS warmed up, speaking at length about his wife and family and declaring that he planned to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.

It was clearly an effort to charm her, a targeted pitch to a powerful woman who could have continued into a future Clinton administration. White House officials were struck by MBS’s strategic move, but also confused. As soon as he had appeared on the scene, American spies had gathered information about him for a personality profile, as they did of all foreign leaders. That had turned up a perplexing situation: MBS had locked his own mother in a palace with two of her sisters. Even more perplexing was that he was hiding his mother’s whereabouts from his own father, the king.

At the time, MBS’s mother was the king’s only remaining wife and he was fond of her. But when he would ask where she was, MBS and his aides would proffer excuses, usually saying she was abroad for medical treatment.

Other members of the royal family had also noticed the apparent disappearance of MBS’s mother. Around the time that Salman became king, she had stopped showing up at family weddings, funerals, and holiday celebrations, leading them to conclude that her son had locked her up somewhere. But, like the Americans, they didn’t know why.

There were a number of theories. American officials and some plugged-in Saudis thought MBS feared his mother would interfere with his rise because she worried that his ambition would split the royal family. Others proposed wilder scenarios, such as MBS suspecting his mother of using black magic on the king to promote other members of her family.

Saudi officials deemed any inquiry into the whereabouts of the king’s wife highly offensive and never provided any information. Other royals considered it inappropriate to inquire, as did American officials, since it did not affect affairs of state. But many wondered what MBS’s ability to confine his own mother and hide her from his father said about his character.

YOUNG PRINCE RISING

WHILE MBS REMAINED a relative mystery, the new crown prince was a known quantity at home and abroad. Mohammed bin Nayef was a reserved man in his mid-fifties with glasses and a brush mustache who avoided the media other than allowing journalists to photograph him when he visited wounded security officers in the hospital. For more than a decade, he had been the giant of the kingdom’s fight against terrorism, first as deputy to his father and later as the head of the Interior Ministry, which oversaw Saudi intelligence and the conventional and secret police.

In 2003, Al Qaeda had declared war on Saudi Arabia, launching a wave of attacks on civilian targets, including compounds where foreigners lived. The threat was so great that the United States withdrew diplomats’ families from the kingdom. MBN oversaw the response, launching a campaign of raids on militant hideouts that dismantled Al Qaeda’s network in the kingdom and stopped the attacks. By the end of the decade, the diplomats’ families had returned.

That fight, which was closely coordinated with the United States, gave MBN deep relationships in Washington, especially in the Central Intelligence Agency. American officials who worked with MBN praised him as serious and hardworking, a spy chief dedicated to the kingdom’s security and to its partnership with the United States.

Inside Saudi Arabia, he was hailed as a hero and known as a deft manager of the kingdom’s religious figures, including many whose views bordered on, or veered into, extremism. The security services he oversaw were unflinching when it came to those who engaged in violence at home. But for everyone else, he championed a carrot-and-stick approach aimed at neutralizing their threat to the state. Homegrown ideologues were to be managed, not stamped out. Even young Saudis who fought with extremist groups abroad were treated as citizens who had been misled and who could, with the proper education and incentives, reintegrate into society.

That approach was put into practice at reform centers in the kingdom’s prisons that bore the prince’s name and used religious teaching, psychology, and cash to put wayward Saudi men on a new path. The centers found wives for the bachelors and granted married prisoners conjugal visits in a facility built like a hotel, with magnetic door cards, playgrounds for kids, and room service. There was never an independent audit to verify the approach’s effectiveness, but American officials came to appreciate it, and Saudis argued that it was more humane than locking people up indefinitely or killing them on the battlefield with drones.

MBN once told a visiting American dignitary that it had pained him to learn that Saudis had played an outsized role in the September 11 attacks.

“Terrorists stole the most valuable things we have,” he said. “They took our faith and our children and used them to attack us.”

His approach to dealing with militancy extended to the families of dead militants, who were told their sons had been “victims,” not “criminals.” That helped families deal with the social fallout caused by having militant offspring and sought to break the cycle of radicalization.

“If you stop five but create fifty” terrorists, MBN said, “that’s dumb.”

That focus on engagement almost killed him. In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with Al Qaeda in Yemen announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to MBN in person. The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him, and sat next to him. Then the man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBN what were described at the time as light wounds.

The next year, MBN provided further proof of his importance as a partner to the United States when he warned the White House and the CIA that powerful bombs hidden in cargo containers were headed for the United States. The bombs were intercepted in Dubai and the United Kingdom and defused.

That history made American officials grateful that the kingdom’s planned future ruler was someone they knew. MBN’s appointment as crown prince was also hailed as a smart way to pass power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons. MBN was popular at home and had only one wife and two daughters, which many assumed would allow him to focus on governance, not on promoting his sons.

But indications soon emerged that MBN’s position was not as secure as it appeared. King Salman collapsed the crown prince’s court into his own, depriving MBN of a major perk of his position and a platform to build ties with subjects. From then on, there was only one Royal Court, overseen by MBS.

That summer, Adel al-Jubeir, the longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington who had been named foreign minister, flew to Nantucket to see Secretary of State John Kerry and spoke to him of MBS as the future of the kingdom due to his focus on reform. Kerry made it clear that the United States would not take sides in a princely struggle over who would inherit the kingdom.

MBS was also little known in the wider Arab world, including among Saudi Arabia’s closest neighbors. Like its fellow smaller monarchies in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates had long viewed Saudi Arabia warily as the region’s giant, whose wealth, power, and population dwarfed its own. For years, the Emiratis had wanted to step out of the Saudi shadow and develop their own national standing, and their leaders privately looked down on their Saudi counterparts as elderly conservatives wedded to ossified ways. An American diplomat wrote that Emirati leaders described the kingdom as “run by cantankerous old men surrounded by advisors who believe the earth is flat.”

The de facto ruler of the Emirates was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, a helicopter pilot and sharp tactician known by his own three-letter moniker, MBZ. He was tall, kept in shape, and maintained a modest demeanor that was uncommon among Gulf royals, sometimes rising during meetings to serve guests coffee or tea. MBZ had worked to give his country international clout that outweighed its size. The Emirates had fewer citizens than Dallas, Texas, and a relatively small army. But he equipped it with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and built special forces units that fought alongside American troops in Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. While few Americans had heard of his country or its leader, he had poured huge sums into lobbying efforts in Washington to make sure that his views on the Middle East reached the centers of power.

King Salman’s appointment of MBN as crown prince did not bode well for the Emirates, since MBN did not get along with MBZ, who had once insulted MBN’s father, saying that the older prince’s clumsiness proved that “Darwin was right.”

But MBZ was curious about MBS and summoned regional experts to see what they knew. He was impressed and deputized his younger brother to get to know the young Saudi. A desert camping trip was arranged so that the two could meet, and they hit it off. It was a deft move on MBZ’s part that laid the foundations of a strengthened regional alliance. Both men benefited. MBS got a powerful mentor who supported his quest to become Saudi Arabia’s future ruler. In return, MBZ impressed his vision of the region on the inexperienced young Saudi, particularly his animosity toward Iran and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.

MBZ began selling MBS to any American official who would listen. MBN was the past and MBS was the future, he argued, suggesting that the administration invest in that future by choosing an official to build a relationship with MBS. President Obama’s policy was that the United States would not take sides in an issue as weighty as who would become the next Saudi king. But there was talk inside the administration of finding an “MBS whisperer” who could mentor the young prince. John Kerry was suggested, but was too busy. Ash Carter, the secretary of defense, was MBS’s natural counterpart, but wasn’t interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed, but deemed too old.

In the end, the idea never took off—at least not until a young Jewish real estate investor from New Jersey named Jared Kushner entered the White House with the next administration.

AS MBS’s POWER grew, so did his interest in tremendous wealth and its trappings. If he had spent his youth watching his wealthier cousins amass fortunes, take lavish vacations, and drop mind-blowing sums on prime real estate, his turn had now come.

His father was king and so could spend as he wished, and MBS’s position enabled him to create new income streams. One involved the Saudi national airline, Saudia, which had planned to buy fifty jets from Airbus, earning a bulk discount while upgrading its fleet. Instead, MBS arranged for a company overseen by his younger brother to buy the jets and lease them to the airline, rerouting the discount and other profits to his family.

In June 2015, the same month that deal was inked, MBS took a group of friends on vacation to the Maldives, a collection of palm-studded islands scattered like strings of pearls in the Indian Ocean. They set up camp at a hyper-luxury resort called Velaa Private Island, where accommodations normally ran from $1,500 to $30,000 per night. To ensure their privacy, the entourage rented out the whole place, giving them exclusive access to its amenities. These included the sandy beaches that ringed the island; the villas with thatched roofs on stilts in the sky-blue ocean; a spa with a cloud-shaped pod that rocked guests into deep relaxation; and the only “snow room” in the Maldives, where vacationers could take a break from the sun and surf with some manufactured arctic chill.

The developer had built the place from scratch, tearing out the native bushes and papaya trees and bringing in paneling from Borneo, deck chairs from Italy, and paving stones from the Jordanian desert that would not burn the feet no matter how long they sat in the sun.

“I always had this idea that our guests would find themselves stranded on a deserted island, and by coincidence, there is this unique resort,” the resort’s Czech architect said.

But relaxation, snorkeling, and watching baby sharks and dolphins visit the coral reef were not the only diversions. MBS also hosted a string of blowout parties, with headline talent ferried in to entertain the guests.

Psy, the South Korean singer, performed “Gangnam Style.” The American rapper Pitbull was photographed in sunglasses and a tan suit being escorted to a seaplane. A few days later, someone photographed the Colombian singer Shakira in a black T-shirt and tights being taken to a VIP terminal at the airport.

“The party has been going on for some days now and we don’t know exactly how long it would last,” a local news site said.

“The Maldives is heaven like, thank you Mr. Smejc,” Pitbull wrote to the resort’s financier, Jirí Smejc, after his trip. “The island was unforgettable. Look forward to the next trip.”

MBS’s vacation came three months after Saudi Arabia had launched its military intervention in Yemen, which fell under his purview as the minister of defense. A number of American officials who reached out to him during that time found him unreachable. Then American intelligence reports came in, explaining that the prince was on vacation in the Maldives.

The parties eventually died down, and the flap they caused may have encouraged MBS to look for a place of his own, where local reporters would not pry into his affairs and post photographs of his guests on the Internet. He found it a month later, floating in the Mediterranean off the coast of France. Near the Port De La Ciotat on the French Riviera was Serene. She was not just any boat, but a superyacht, a tad under 440 feet long, with navy blue sides, white upper decks, and a helipad on her nose. When she hit the water in 2011, an industry publication hailed her as “one of the ten largest yachts ever built in the world and one of the finest in terms of sophistication and technology.” She had a helicopter hangar, water-level hatches for speedboats, and a submarine dock. And she was massive, with 48,000 square feet of internal space, more than the base of the Parthenon or the concourse of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

Much of that space, distributed over seven decks, was jammed with luxury amenities for two dozen guests. A glass elevator carried them from level to level. A spiral staircase landed in a dining room with a grand piano. There was a gym, a cinema, a climbing wall, and an outdoor hot tub with commanding views. One sundeck had a glass floor over a seawater pool so that those chilling up top could watch their friends below.

The summer before MBS bought the boat, tabloid journalists had reported that Bill Gates chartered Serene for a family vacation near Sardinia, where a helicopter had spirited him out to sea after a tennis match. But the boat’s owner was Yuri Shefler, a Russian tycoon best known as the proprietor of Stolichnaya brand vodka. So it was to Shefler’s people that MBS dispatched a confidant to buy the boat. The deal was done within hours, for a total of €420 million, or more than $456 million.

MBS’s father, the newly crowned king, was also living large. That summer, King Salman landed in the south of France for a three-week vacation with what journalists called his “inner circle.” That turned out to be an entourage of a thousand people, who booked up local properties and rented hundreds of luxury cars. The king slept in a sprawling beachfront villa in Vallauris, where Rita Hayworth had married Prince Aly Khan of Pakistan in 1949. Local businesses feted the influx of so many wealthy Saudis, but other residents were less pleased. About 150,000 signed a petition against the closing of the public beach in front of the villa, and the town’s mayor complained to the French president after workers poured a slab of concrete on the sand to install an elevator for the king. So after eight days, the king packed up and moved his vacation, and much of his entourage, to Morocco. A Saudi official said the move had nothing to do with the negative media coverage.

Later, on a beach in Tangier, workers built a new vacation palace for King Salman, with blue helipads, a string of guest villas, and a giant tent.

Other properties also caught MBS’s eye. A company linked to the prince’s money managers bought a 30,000-acre game ranch in South Africa that workers ringed with a double-layered electric fence. Land inside was allocated for twenty villas and a runway long enough to land 747s bringing in guests to hunt big game.

In late 2015, MBS laid out more than $300 million for a French château that Money magazine called “the world’s most expensive home.” In 2014, Kim Kardashian had stopped there for a photo while reportedly considering the château for her wedding to Kanye West. Built on 56 acres and surrounded by forests in the Paris suburb of Louveciennes, the Château Louis XIV had been built from scratch in place of an older palace and combined seventeenth-century craftsmanship with twenty-first-century technology.

“The result is an opus of architectural art with an exclusive royal touch,” its developer said.

The château’s grounds boasted intricate flower beds, a gold-leafed fountain, and a hedged labyrinth. Crowning the reception hall was a domed ceiling painted with winged creatures. It had a string of luxury suites, a sauna and spa, a movie theater, a nightclub, a wine cellar, and a moat with glass walls, through which guests could gander at giant fish. The only thing missing appeared to be the proprietor, whom neighbors said they never saw at the property.

After MBS was revealed as the château’s buyer, a neighbor who had once foraged for mushrooms on the grounds complained that they were now off-limits.

“Before, it was a ruin only for ghosts,” she said. “Now it is brand new for ghosts.”

COURTING OBAMA

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA came into the White House in 2009 hoping to turn a new page in the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world. He understood, and talked about, how the United States’ focus on terrorism had led it to neglect other problems in the Middle East and spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that suggested sympathy for the Arab point of view. His first television interview was with a Saudi-owned network; he delivered a high-profile address to the Islamic world from a university in Cairo; and he spoke directly to Muslims in his inaugural address.

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” he said. “To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Despite the rhetoric, the Saudis were ambivalent about Obama, and their view got worse over time. During my early visits to the kingdom, I heard growing frustration with how Obama had handled the Arab Spring, how he had failed to support the uprising in Syria, and how Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies needed to pursue greater independence from the United States. That attitude became more entrenched after the announcement of the Iran deal, which left Saudi Arabia feeling that its protector was engaged in a dangerous dalliance with a wily foe.

In September 2015, King Salman and MBS came to the United States for a visit deeply colored by those differences. During a meeting in the Oval Office, Obama pressed the king on human rights, suggesting that increasing the margins for expression and granting more freedoms to women were necessary for the kingdom to develop. The king grew animated, pushing back and arguing that Obama did not understand Saudi society.

A smaller meeting was also held, with just the king, MBS, Obama, and Susan Rice, the national security adviser. As soon as they were alone, the king turned the floor over to MBS, who laid out grand plans for the future of the kingdom, which included opening up society and diversifying the economy away from oil. Obama and Rice listened, but refrained from giving the full-throated American endorsement their Saudi guests seemed to be hoping for. That plan would later be released publicly as Saudi Vision 2030, the centerpiece of MBS’s ambitions. But at the time, Obama and Rice felt that the goals were laudable even if the plan itself seemed shallow.

“He knew how to say the right talking points about reforming the kingdom, but he didn’t seem to know what was underneath them,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, recalled later. “He had all the right buzz words, but if you tried to probe them like they did, he didn’t seem to know what they meant.”

During the same visit, Secretary of State John Kerry hosted MBS for dinner at his mansion in Georgetown. The evening began with a chat in the ground floor sitting room. At one point, MBS eyed the piano. Kerry asked if he played, and MBS sat down and performed a well-practiced classical piece, surprising everyone in the room. Given Wahhabism’s animosity toward music, MBS’s hosts had not expected that he played. The group then moved downstairs to a dining room overlooking the back lawn. During a discussion of Middle East politics, MBS surprised his host again by suggesting that he could determine who ruled where in the Arab world.

“If I want Sisi out, he’ll be out,” he said, referring to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

None of the Americans present knew how serious he was, but when the official report on the dinner made its way around the White House, many were taken aback by the prince’s cockiness.

At the time, a range of officials and opinion-makers in and outside the United States had noticed MBS’s growing power, and their early assessments of him varied widely. In late 2015, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spent an evening with MBS and wrote the first in what would be a procession of breathless columns by foreign commentators lauding him as a much-needed change agent.

MBS, Friedman wrote, “wore me out” with talk of proposed innovations few expected in Saudi Arabia. The prince planned to improve government performance through an online dashboard that would track Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, for each ministry. The kingdom was too dependent on oil, so MBS would reduce subsidies for wealthy Saudis and institute a value added tax and “sin taxes” on cigarettes and sugary drinks. The government would privatize key sectors and charge fees for undeveloped lands, meaning, MBS argued, that even if oil fell to $30 a barrel, the state would still have enough cash.

Political reform played no role in the prince’s plans, Friedman noted, but MBS said that the connection between the royal family and the people was enough.

“A government that is not a part of the society and not representing them, it is impossible that it will remain,” MBS said. “People misunderstand our monarchy. It is not like Europe. It is a tribal form of monarchy, with many tribes and subtribes and regions connecting to the top.”

Those relationships guided governance, he said. “The king cannot just wake up and decide to do something.”

Soon after, a starkly different assessment emerged from Germany’s foreign intelligence service. In a one-and-a-half-page memo sent to German news organizations, the BND warned that a new, assertive Saudi Arabia could destabilize the Middle East.

“The cautious diplomatic stance of the older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention,” the report said. This had led Saudi Arabia to pursue an increasingly confrontational stance toward Iran through proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.

“Saudi Arabia wants to prove that it is ready to take unprecedented military, financial, and political risks in order not to fall into a disadvantageous position in the region,” it said, adding that MBS risked doing too much too fast.

“The concentration of economic and foreign policy power on Mohammed bin Salman contains the latent danger that, in an attempt to establish himself in the royal succession while his father is still alive, he could overreach with expensive measures or reforms that would unsettle other members of the royal family and the population.”

ON THE SECOND day of 2016, the world woke to the news that forty-seven men had been executed in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s largest mass execution in thirty-six years. Most of the men who were killed that day were Sunni Muslims who had been convicted of links to Al Qaeda attacks in the kingdom. But a number were members of the kingdom’s Shiite minority, and one was famous. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was a thin preacher with a salt-and-pepper beard who wore a large white turban and had a reputation for diatribes against the royal family.

An estimated 10 percent of Saudi citizens were Shiites. They lived mostly in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, where they faced consistent discrimination. While most kept their criticisms of the government to themselves, some participated in protests against the state, which during the Arab Spring grew more ardent and sometimes violent.

Al-Nimr hailed from the village of Awamiya, which had a history of opposition to the monarchy. After more than a decade abroad for religious studies in Iran and Syria, he had returned to his village and taken up at a local mosque, where he delivered fiery calls for Shiite rights. His reach was small at first, and many in his community avoided him, fearing trouble. In a diplomatic cable, an American diplomat said locals dismissed the sheikh as “a secondary player in local politics.”

But his star rose with the Arab Spring in 2011. Inspired by protesters elsewhere, Shiites in Saudi Arabia and the nearby island nation of Bahrain joined the movement, clashing with security forces. Young Shiites who felt their elders’ quiet efforts to win concessions had failed coalesced around al-Nimr, who overflowed with anger. He argued that Shiites deserved a fair share of the country’s oil wealth and suggested that they secede from the kingdom. In one sermon, he called on the downtrodden to rise up against “oppressors.”

“In any place he rules—Bahrain, here, in Yemen, in Egypt, or in any place—the unjust ruler is hated,” he said. “Whoever defends the oppressor is his partner with him in oppression, and whoever is with the oppressed shares with him his reward from God.”

He enraged the Saudi leadership by attacking the royal family, comparing its members to villains in Shiite history and branding them “tyrants” who should be toppled.

“A crown prince dies, put a new crown prince! What are we, a farm? Poultry for them?” he shouted in one sermon. “We don’t accept the Al Saud as rulers. We don’t accept them and we want to remove them.”

The Saudi authorities arrested al-Nimr in 2012, shooting him in the leg during a raid. Pictures of the cleric wrapped in a bloody cloth fueled further protests. A Saudi court sentenced him to death for charges that included breaking allegiance to the ruler, inciting sectarian strife, supporting riots, and the destruction of property. The United States, the European Union, and the United Nations all expressed concern about the trial’s fairness.

His arrest and trial elevated al-Nimr from a small-town firebrand to a lightning rod in the growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. To Saudi Arabia, al-Nimr was a dangerous rabble-rouser who personified the kingdom’s fears of Shiite insurrection and Iranian meddling Iran and its allies saw the cleric as an invaluable domestic foe to the Saudi ruling family, and they amplified his message, making him a regional figure.

As news of the cleric’s execution spread, protesters chanting “Death to Al Saud” threw firebombs at the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, smashed windows and furniture, tossed papers from the roof, and set the building alight. Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran and gave the Iranian ambassador and the country’s other diplomats forty-eight hours to get out. Iran followed suit. Saudi Arabia and Iran had long been at odds, but the episode marked a sharp escalation in the regional Cold War that would fuel regional tensions for years to come.

A FEW DAYS after the executions, MBS sat down with journalists from The Economist magazine for his first full-length interview, giving the world the most detailed description yet of his ambitions for the future of the kingdom. He defended the executions, including that of al-Nimr, saying they were the result of a legal process the rulers could not intervene in. But the interview focused on his economic vision, which had developed since he pitched it to Obama the year before. The kingdom was overhauling its economy, he said, privatizing health care and education to take pressure off the government budget; developing a domestic military industry; turning undeveloped state land into a valuable asset; and increasing religious tourism to Mecca and Medina. The plans were hugely ambitious, and the prince threw around sums in the tens of billions of dollars as if they were casual investments.

What generated the most buzz, however, was his surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia would sell shares of Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil monopoly and the world’s most valuable company.

“I believe it is in the interest of the Saudi market, and it is in the interest of Aramco, and it is for the interest of more transparency, and to counter corruption, if any, that may be circling around Aramco,” he said.

It was an eye-popping statement. For anyone familiar with the oil industry, it was clear that the proposed transaction would be massive. No outsider knew exactly how much Aramco was worth, as it had never had a formal valuation and the kingdom’s oil reserves had never been audited. But the Saudis estimated its value at between $2 and $3 trillion and said they would sell shares of up to 5 percent of the company, earning more than $100 billion. If those numbers worked out, it would be the largest initial public offering in history.

Others zoomed in on two words MBS used to describe the plan: transparency and corruption. The first was significant because Aramco’s finances had always been opaque, especially when it came to the share of its profits that went to the royal family. Exposing those details would reveal one of the kingdom’s most closely guarded secrets. The second drew notice because in a kingdom rife with mismanagement and corruption, Aramco had always been seen as the cleanest, best-run institution. Did the prince have reason to suspect foul play?

The proposed IPO lit up energy and financial markets whose analysts and dealers would spend the next few years scrambling to get information on the kingdom’s plans and angling for a piece of the action.

MBS summed up his interview with a description of the Saudi Arabia he dreamed of, for himself and for the kingdom’s other young people. It was a place that would not be dependent on oil and would have a growing economy, transparent laws, a strong position in the world, popular participation in decision-making, and would participate in “facing the obstacles and the challenges that face the world.”

“My dream as a young man in Saudi Arabia, and the dreams of men in Saudi Arabia, are so many, and I try to compete with them and their dreams, and they compete with mine, to create a better Saudi Arabia,” he said.

It was heady, grandiose talk, the likes of which the kingdom had never heard before. But what to make of it? He was still only number three in the kingdom’s power structure, and the barriers to everything he wanted to accomplish were numerous—and deeply embedded in his own society.

NO SUCH THING AS WAHHABISM

DURING MY EARLY visits to Saudi Arabia, I became friends with a Saudi businessman who had returned to the kingdom to live after studying in the United States. He was a charming blend of cultures, a fan of dirty jokes and hamburgers who hailed from a prominent family and fasted during Ramadan. We would go out to dinner and discuss current events. I got the feeling that being with an American reminded him of his old life, and I appreciated his insights into Saudi society.

One day, he was angry when he picked me up. I asked what was the matter, and he delivered a tapestry of insults at the religious police, the force officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

“The Commission,” as Saudis called it, was deeply woven into the kingdom’s history as part of the alliance between the royal family and the clerics. It owed its existence to the Quranic injunction to build a religious society by encouraging good behavior and stopping bad. The Commission had come to exert great influence in Saudi society, a force of stern, bearded men (it did not employ women) with offices and patrol cars who reported to the king and roamed public places imposing what they saw as proper Islamic conduct. It bothered them little that their rules were much more strict than those practiced in nearly all other Islamic societies.

They included preventing unauthorized ikhtilat, or “mixing,” between unrelated women and men; enforcing a ban on music; making sure that merchants closed shops during prayer times; herding people to the mosque when the call to prayer sounded; castigating men who wore their hair long; and ensuring that women dressed modestly in public, which meant shrouding their forms and covering their hair. If they covered their faces, too, that was a plus. If not, the men of the Commission would trail them, sometimes wielding batons, commanding, “Cover up! Cover up!” and insulting the women’s honor.

The Commission were the on-the-ground enforcers of Wahhabism, and Saudis had no choice but to heed their injunctions or pay the price, as my friend had learned.

The day before, he told me, his wife had been returning to her car from the grocery store with her hair covered but her face showing, and carrying their baby. A man from the Commission spotted her and told her to cover her face, insulting her. She locked herself in her car, snapped a photo of the man, and sent it to her husband to let him know she was being harassed.

He rushed to the supermarket in a rage but couldn’t find his wife’s car. He spotted the Commission’s vehicle and worried she had been arrested, so he ran to open the back. The officers shoved him away, he shoved back, and he remembered seeing one of the men “flying toward the Starbucks.” He realized his wife was not in the car and went home.

Shortly after, the police called. Cases had been filed against him and his wife for assaulting an officer from the Commission and for distributing his photo. My friend had to report to the police station, which he feared would mean jail time. So he spent the next few weeks working his connections to get the cases dropped, a process he finalized by paying a hefty fine (he called it a bribe) to the Commission. The experience left him so bitter that he considered giving up on Saudi Arabia and returning to the United States.

“They are germs,” he told me. “Filthy criminals.”

BY 2016, THE rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had led to new international scrutiny of Wahhabism, and my editor sent me to Saudi Arabia to explore how it was lived in the modern day.

I had always been struck by the kingdom’s unique mix of urbanism and desert tradition, with a determined adherence to a strict interpretation of thousand-year-old scriptures. Tremendous wealth, gleaming skyscrapers, and motorways packed with SUVs existed within an all-encompassing religious regime, in which questions about how to interact with other faiths, handle money, and treat animals were answered with stories about the Prophet Muhammad or quotes from the Quran.

Religion permeated daily life. Images of men and women were blurred on billboards and department store mannequins lacked heads because Wahhabism rejected depictions of the human form. Insurance companies employed boards of clerics to ensure their compliance with Sharia law. Textbooks spelled out how girls should cover their bodies (completely), how boys should cut their hair (short), and how often a person should trim his or her pubic hair (often).

There was no public trace of any other religion, because the men of the Commission actively suppressed other faiths. Jews working in the kingdom kept it to themselves. Christians didn’t wear crosses. There were no churches, and not even a Church’s Chicken (they called it “Texas Chicken”). Saudi officials denied that this showed intolerance, arguing that the kingdom was a unique place for Muslims, with its own rules, as the Vatican was for Christians. (It did not seem relevant to them that women in headscarves or men in turbans could visit St. Peter’s Basilica without issue.)

As in any country, personal religious practices varied, but even those who followed the state’s official creed were alarmed by the tendency among Westerners to equate it with extremism and insisted that they supported “moderate Islam.” That was a slippery term. In Saudi Arabia, it meant beheading criminals, jailing “apostates,” and barring women from traveling abroad without the permission of a male “guardian.”

Gay rights? Not so much.

The kingdom had championed foreign jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s (in cooperation with the CIA), but that idea had gone out of style by the time I arrived, and government clerics focused their teaching on another tenet of Wahhabism: obedience to the ruler. I heard little disparaging talk about Christians and Jews, but the clerics persistently attacked Shiites, for ideological reasons and as part of the rivalry with Iran.

The only Saudis who ever called me an infidel were children.

A Saudi journalist once introduced me to his 9-year-old daughter, whom he had enrolled in a private school so she could learn English.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“My name is Dana.”

“How old are you?”

“I am nine.”

“When is your birthday?”

She switched to Arabic.

“We don’t have that in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “That’s an infidel holiday.”

Alarmed, her father asked her where she had learned that, and she retrieved a government textbook and flipped to a lesson listing “forbidden holidays”: Christmas and Thanksgiving. Her teacher had added birthdays to the lesson.

Another time, I was having coffee with a conservative friend and his two young sons when the call to prayer sounded. My friend excused himself to pray, and his sons looked at me wide-eyed, wondering why I did not follow.

“Are you an infidel?” one asked.

DESPITE THESE OVERWHELMINGLY visible signs, Mohammed bin Salman consistently argued that Wahhabism didn’t exist.

“No one can define Wahhabism,” he said. “There is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism.”

He was not the only one. The hardest part of discussing Wahhabism with Saudis was their tendency to deny its existence, for a range of reasons. Even the most devout Saudis did not identify themselves as Wahhabis and argued that Muhammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab had not established a new creed, but merely restored Islam to its roots. Others noted that Wahhabism was often used as a blanket slur against a range of practices or beliefs that the person wielding the term didn’t like.

But Saudi and foreign academics and Muslims from other societies found the word useful to describe the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam born in Saudi Arabia and propagated by its government at home and abroad. Under that definition, it would have been hard to find a truer Wahhabi than Hisham al-Sheikh, a direct descendant of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the cleric who had started it all hundreds of years before.

“There is no such thing as Wahhabism,” al-Sheikh told me the first time we met. “There is only true Islam.”

Since Ibn Abdul-Wahhab’s death, his movement had mushroomed into a massive religious establishment inside the Saudi state. It included a legal system that applied Sharia law; a network of universities that cranked out graduates in religious studies; a council of clerics that advised the king; tens of thousands of mosque imams who delivered the government’s message from the pulpit; and, of course, the Commission, to police public behavior. In addition, a complex web of organizations worked to spread the faith abroad, from Texas to Tajikistan.

Al-Sheikh’s life had been defined by the religious establishment. His uncle was the Grand Mufti, the kingdom’s top religious official. He had memorized the Quran at a young age and studied with prominent scholars before completing a PhD in Sharia law, writing a thesis on how technology changed its application. Now he wore a number of hats, all of them religious. He advised the minister of Islamic affairs; wrote studies for the clerics who advised the king; served on the Sharia board of the MedGulf insurance company; and trained judges to serve in the kingdom’s courts. On Fridays, he preached at a mosque near his mother’s house and welcomed visitors who came to see his uncle.

When I met al-Sheikh, he was a portly man of 42, with a long beard and no mustache, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and in the middle of a shining career. We met in the music-free lobby of a Riyadh hotel, where we sat on purple couches, ate dates, drank coffee, and chatted, with al-Sheikh glancing from time to time at his iPhone.

“I am an open-minded person,” he told me.

It was clear he hoped I would become a Muslim.

He had traveled extensively abroad and loved the United States. He had been to Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, and California and visited a synagogue, a black church, and an Amish community, whose adherence to strict religious rules he admired. The hardest part had been during Ramadan, when he struggled to find a restaurant open late that did not have a bar.

“All I had was IHOP,” he said.

He told me that Islam did not forbid doing business or being friends with Christians and Jews. He frowned when I asked about Shiites, but said it was wrong to declare takfir, or infidelity, on entire groups. Each person would be judged individually.

The issue of birthdays was complicated. He didn’t oppose their celebration, but his wife did, so their four children did not attend birthday parties thrown by less strict Saudis. Instead, he showed me a video on his phone of the family’s own celebration. They gathered around a cake bearing the face of his 15-year-old son, who had memorized the Quran, a major milestone. They lit sparklers and cheered, but did not sing.

Many strict Wahhabis forbid music, but al-Sheikh kept an open mind, relatively. He allowed for background music in restaurants, but opposed music that put listeners in a state similar to drunkenness, making them jump around and bang their heads.

“We have something better,” he told me. “You can listen to the Quran.”

Since much of what shocks outsiders about Saudi Arabia is its treatment of women, I wanted to talk to a conservative Saudi woman, which was a challenge because most would refuse to meet an unrelated man—let alone an infidel foreign correspondent. So I had a female Saudi journalist I worked with contact al-Sheikh’s wife, Meshael.

She agreed to meet me, so I asked her husband for permission.

“She is very busy,” he said, changing the subject.

So Meshael and my colleague met at a women’s coffee shop, where they could uncover their faces and hair and talk freely.

Meshael and al-Sheikh were cousins and their marriage had been arranged when he was 21 and she was 16. They met once for less than an hour before they were married, and he had been allowed a glimpse at her face before making his final decision to wed.

“It was hard for me to look at him or to check him out, as I was so shy,” she said.

He had accepted her condition that she be allowed to continue her studies, and she was now completing a doctorate in education while raising their four children. She disputed the idea that Saudi women lacked rights.

“They believe we are oppressed because we don’t drive, but that is incorrect,” she said. Driving would be a hassle in Riyadh’s traffic anyway. “Here women are respected and honored in many ways you don’t find in the West.”

She, too, was a descendant of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab and said proudly that one of her ancestors had founded the religious police.

“Praise God that we have the Commission to protect our country!”

THE PRIMACY OF Islam in Saudi life had fed the growth of a huge religious sector that extended beyond the state’s official clerics. Public life was filled with celebrity sheikhs: old sheikhs, young sheikhs, sheikhs who used to be extremists and now preached tolerance, sheikhs whom women found sexy, and a black sheikh who had compared himself to Barack Obama. They competed for followers on social media in the kingdom’s hyper-wired society, and a number of them, including the blind, elderly Grand Mufti, had their own television shows.

This embrace of technology ran counter to the history of Wahhabi clerics rejecting nearly every innovation as a threat to Islam. Throughout Saudi history, the clerics had sought to ban the telegraph, the radio, the camera, cinema, soccer, girls’ education, and television, whose introduction in the 1960s caused outrage.

In areas where it was not entirely clear what was halal or haram—permitted or forbidden—Saudis turned to clerics for fatwas, or religious opinions. Some fatwas had made international news, such as when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran called for the killing of the author Salman Rushdie, but most had to do with personal religious practice. Others revealed the lengths clerics went to when applying ancient scriptures to modern life.

Take the cleric who appeared to call for the death of Mickey Mouse and then backtracked. Or the cleric who had to clarify that he had not, in fact, forbidden all-you-can-eat buffets. That same sheikh was asked whether it was OK to take a photo with a cat. The cat was not the problem, the cleric said. The photo was.

“Photography is not permitted unless necessary,” he said. “Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything.”

The private fatwa sector sometimes got unruly, so the government tried to impose consistency with official fatwa institutions. But their fatwas provoked laughter, too, like the one that deemed spending money on Pokémon products “cooperation in sin and transgression.” Others contradicted government policy. The state, since King Abdullah, had been trying to push more women into the workforce, an effort further advanced by MBS. But the state fatwa organization warned against the “danger of women joining men in their workplace,” calling it “the reason behind the destruction of societies.”

While digging around on the organization’s website, I was shocked to find a fatwa in English from the previous Grand Mufti that called for infidels to be killed or taken as slaves until they became Muslims.

“Whoever refuses to follow the straight path deserves to be killed or enslaved in order to establish justice, maintain security and peace and safeguard lives, honor and property,” it read. “Slavery in Islam is like a purifying machine or sauna in which those who are captured enter to wash off their dirt and then they come out clean, pure, and safe, from another door.”

I was having coffee with al-Sheikh once and he answered his cellphone, listened intently, and issued a fatwa on the spot. He got such calls all the time, he complained. This query was a simple one: At what point did a pilgrim headed to Mecca have to don the white cloths of ritual purity? Jeddah, he said. But others baffled him, and he declined to rule if he was not sure. Once, a woman had asked whether she could wear fake eyelashes. He told her he didn’t know, but later decided it was fine, on one condition: “That there is no cheating.”

A woman could put them on before a man proposed and got his first peek at her face—marital false advertising.

“And then after they get married, they’re gone!” he said. “That is not permitted.”

One Friday, he invited me to visit his uncle, Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh.

We entered a vast reception hall near the mufti’s house in Riyadh, where a dozen bearded students sat on padded benches along the walls. The mufti presided in the center in a raised armchair, his feet clad in brown socks and perched on a cushion. The students read religious texts, and the mufti provided commentary. The younger al-Sheikh told me his uncle was 75 and had not been able to see since age 14, when a German doctor had tried to save his eyesight and instead left him blind.

My turn came to ask a question, and I asked one that was on the minds of many Westerners: How did he respond to critics who compared Wahhabism to the ideology of the Islamic State?

“That is all lies and slander. Daesh is an aggressive, tyrannous group that has no relation,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

After a pause, he told me, “You must become a Muslim.”

My family were Christians, I said.

“The religion you follow has no source,” he said. I needed to accept the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation.

“Your religion is not a religion,” he said. “In the end, you must face God.”

MY REPORTING ALSO led me to the home of a man whose relationship with the religious establishment was more conflicted. Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi had spent most of his life working for the Commission, helping to protect the kingdom from secularism, Westernization, and general religious laxity. Some of his tasks had resembled police work: catching drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that banned alcohol. But most of it focused on upholding the kingdom’s strict social rules on dress and ikhtilat, the hated gender mixing that opened the door to fornication, adultery, broken homes, orphans, and all-around societal collapse.

I met al-Ghamdi in a sitting room in his Jeddah apartment that had been decorated to look like a Bedouin tent, with burgundy fabric on the walls, gold tassels hanging from the roof, and carpets on the floor, on which al-Ghamdi prayed periodically. He was 51 and sported the same signs of a devout Saudi man as al-Sheikh—the long beard and bare upper lip. For much of his life, the beliefs of both men would have lined up, too, but al-Ghamdi had gone through a religious reckoning that had caused him to question his old life and the religious establishment that had defined it.

Little in his background foretold his future as a religious reformer. He had worked at the customs office in the port of Jeddah during university but quit after a cleric told him that Islam forbade collecting duties. After graduation, he studied religion in his spare time and handled international accounts for a government office, a job that required travel to non-Muslim countries. At the time, the clerics recommended avoiding infidel lands, so he quit.

He next got a job teaching economics at a technical school, but became so annoyed that the curriculum did not include Islamic finance that he quit that, too. When he landed a job with the Commission in Jeddah, he thought, finally, a vocation that matched his religious convictions.

In different positions there and in Mecca, he helped catch prostitutes and sorcerers, who could be beheaded. But over time he grew uneasy with the force’s methods, feeling that his colleagues’ zeal made them overreact, breaking into homes to hunt for contraband or humiliating suspects.

“Let’s say someone drank alcohol,” he said. “That does not represent an attack on the religion, but they exaggerated in how they treated people.”

He got a position reviewing cases and tried to report abuses. One case involved a middle-aged bachelor who received two young women in his home on weekends. The man did not pray at the mosque, so his neighbors suspected the worst. They called the Commission, which raided his house and caught the man red-handed—visiting with his own adult daughters.

“People were humiliated in inhuman ways, and that humiliation could cause hatred of religion,” al-Ghamdi said.

In 2005, al-Ghamdi was promoted to be the head of the Commission for the Mecca region, a big job overseeing scores of stations in a large, diverse area. He worked hard, but worried privately that the force’s emphasis was off. He returned to the scriptures and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and found a gap between what they contained and what the Commission was imposing. There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, for example, and no one had sought to stamp it out, not least the prophet himself.

Al-Ghamdi came to believe that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was actually Arabian cultural practices that had become mixed up with their faith. It was a startling conclusion, and dangerous for a man of his station. So he kept quiet, at least for a time.

IN 2007, SAUDI Arabia broke ground on a new pet project for the monarch, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which was supposed to grow into a world-class university on the Red Sea with the help of a royal endowment of more than $10 billion. To ensure international standards, King Abdullah insulated KAUST, as it was known, from clerical interference. Female students would dress as they wished, and classes would be co-ed.

KAUST followed the precedent of Saudi Aramco, the oil company, where the clerics had also been forbidden to tread, highlighting a great Saudi contradiction: As much as the royals preached Islamic values, when they wanted to earn money or innovate, they did not solicit the clerics’ advice. They locked them out.

Most clerics stayed mum on the plan, out of deference to the king, but one member of the top clerical body warned on a call-in show about the dangers of co-education. There would be sexual harassment. Men and women would cavort, distracting them from their studies. Husbands would grow jealous of their wives. There could be rapes.

“Mixing has many corrupting factors, and its evil is great,” declared Sheikh Saad al-Shathri, suggesting that the king would stop it if he knew.

But the mixing at KAUST had been the king’s idea, and he promptly fired the cleric.

The ordeal frustrated al-Ghamdi. He felt that the clerics were not supporting an initiative that was good for Saudi Arabia. So after praying about it, he put his thoughts in two articles about religious practices that were published in Okaz newspaper in 2009.

They were the first volleys in a prolonged battle between al-Ghamdi and the religious establishment. He followed with other articles, and faced off on TV with noted clerics who countered him with their own evidence from the Islamic scriptures. His colleagues at the Commission shunned him, so he requested—and swiftly received—early retirement.

Once off the force, he cast doubt on other practices, arguing that it was not necessary to close shops during prayer times, force people to go to the mosque, oblige women to cover their faces, or bar them from driving. Women during the time of the prophet had ridden camels, which he argued was more provocative than driving SUVs. At one point, a woman asked him if she could not only show her face, but wear makeup. He replied, Why not? To prove that he meant it, he went on a popular talk show with his wife, Jawahir, her face bare and adorned with a dusting of makeup.

His arguments went off like a bomb inside the religious establishment, shaking the foundations of the social order that gave the clerics their power. Condemnation rained down from the senior ranks. Some attacked al-Ghamdi’s credentials, saying he was not really a sheikh. That was a dubious accusation because there was no standard qualification for sheikh-hood. Others questioned his résumé, arguing, correctly, that he had no degree in religion and pointing out, also correctly, that his doctorate was from Ambassador University Corporation, a diploma mill.

“There is no doubt that this man is bad,” a member of the kingdom’s top clerical council said. “It is necessary for the state to assign someone to summon and torture him.”

The Grand Mufti, who years later would beseech me to become a Muslim, addressed the issue on his call-in show, saying that the kingdom’s television channels should ban content that “corrupts the religion and the morals and values of society.”

The clerical attacks were loud, but the social blowback hurt more. Angry callers yelled at al-Ghamdi through his cellphone. He got death threats on Twitter. His tribe disowned him as “troubled and confused.” A mosque where he preached asked him to stop coming. Vandals scrawled insulting graffiti on the wall of his house. A group of men showed up at his door, demanding to “mix” with his womenfolk. His sons—he has nine children—called the police.

Al-Ghamdi had not broken any laws and faced no legal charges, but the attacks shook his family. The relatives of his eldest son’s fiancée called off the couple’s wedding, not wanting to associate their family with his. His sister’s husband left her after she stood by her brother. A boy at school taunted his 15-year-old son, Ammar, saying, “How did your mom go on TV? That’s not right. You have no manners.”

So Ammar punched him.

BY THE TIME I met al-Ghamdi in 2016, the hubbub had mostly died down, although he kept a low profile because strangers still insulted him when he appeared in public. He was publishing columns in foreign newspapers, but was otherwise jobless—a cleric whose positions had rendered him unemployable in the Islamic kingdom.

It was a bad year for the Commission. A video of its officers confronting a girl in a mall parking lot had gone viral. It showed her being thrown to the ground and yelping as her abaya flew up, exposing her torso. For many Saudis, “the Nakheel Mall girl” personified the Commission’s overreach. Then the Commission arrested a popular talk show host who had criticized religious figures, and photos of him appeared online in handcuffs with bottles of liquor. It appeared that the photos had been staged and leaked by the Commission in an attempted character assassination. The outrage grew.

Those incidents highlighted the irony of al-Ghamdi’s ordeal: Many Saudis, including important royals and even some clerics, agreed with him that the kingdom’s strictures had gone too far. One of them was MBS, who recognized that clerical control was a major barrier to his development plans. So in April 2016, a surprise royal decree stripped the religious police of their powers. Henceforth, they could not arrest, question, or pursue subjects except in cooperation with the actual police. And they were advised to be “gentle and kind” in their interactions with citizens.

When the news broke, I contacted a number of Saudi friends for their thoughts, but no one knew what to make of it. Was it for real? It seemed too good to be true, and the Commission too powerful to merely fade away. But over time we realized that, yes, it was real. With a single royal decree, MBS had defanged the clerics, clearing the way for vast changes they most certainly would have opposed.

GRAND VISIONS

THE CONSULTANTS CAME in droves, wearing well-cut suits with power ties, flying in first-class from Dubai, Beirut, or London, and checking in to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. They put in long days extracting information about the Saudi government and economy and refining it into detailed reports and flashy PowerPoint presentations. When the time came to present their findings, they showed up at the Royal Court and waited in its ornate, high-ceilinged sitting rooms, where they inevitably found crowds of consultants from competing firms ahead of them in line. As they waited, servers brought endless cups of tea or saffron-flavored Saudi coffee. Often, they were given nighttime appointments, told to come at 10 P.M. and made to wait until 2 A.M. before being dismissed and told to return the next day. For many, it was a frustrating, grueling routine, but the money was great and there was no alternative if you wanted to pitch your services to the highest-spending customer in the Middle East: Mohammed bin Salman.

As MBS formulated his plans to remake the kingdom, he realized not only that he had to defang the clerics who would oppose change, but that he needed experts to figure out what had to be done and how. So he turned to management consultants, opening the taps of Saudi cash so crowds of highly educated foreigners could advise him on everything from diversifying the economy to streamlining military procurement to reformatting school curricula.

In many ways, it was a match made in heaven. Saudi Arabia lacked human capital in many domains that MBS wanted to reform, and he himself had little relevant experience for much of what he wanted to do. So why not bring in graduates of Oxford and Harvard who had worked on similar issues in other countries to help him out? They could synthesize past experiences, the thinking went, and give more unvarnished advice than the prince could expect from fellow Saudis.

MBS came along at a time of uncertainty for the consulting industry in the Middle East. Many firms had lost business in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen when their governments were toppled and economies roiled during the Arab Spring. So they had shifted toward the wealthy Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, which were stable, with small domestic professional classes and lots of money to spend. MBS turbocharged that shift, because of the size of Saudi Arabia’s economy and the faith the young prince had in what foreign experts had to offer.

He commissioned the biggest companies, McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Strategy&, as well as smaller boutique firms, to handle public relations and implement projects. Some firms kept permanent offices near the Royal Court, so they could be summoned quickly and sometimes turn around projects in twenty-four hours, much faster than they normally worked. MBS would pit them against one another, giving the same project to competing firms and making them present in front of the others, a live battleground of ideas.

“It’s like a beauty pageant,” said a consultant who worked with the higher reaches of the Saudi government.

And the budget for it boomed. The kingdom’s spending on consultants increased by double digits the year Salman became king, and it would continue to grow, with MBS spending more than $1 billion per year on foreign expertise.

But there was often a culture gap between the consultants, who valued punctuality, transparency, democracy, and open markets, and the Saudis, whose work ethic and schedules were unreliable and who lived in a highly secretive absolute monarchy. After the Arab Spring, there had been discussions inside McKinsey about the ethics of working with dictators, a former consultant there told me. But the company’s leaders had ignored the risks, instead viewing their work as an opportunity to play a positive role in the development of countries such as Saudi Arabia.

“There was no question about working with MBS,” the former McKinsey consultant told me. “they were all-in.”

THE CONSULTANTS NEVER had trouble entering Saudi Arabia to work. I did.

For my first visit to Saudi Arabia, when I had written about the women defying the driving ban, I had received a press visa—one week, single entry, nonrenewable. When it expired, I struggled to get back in. I applied for a new visa and it came through a few months later—two weeks, single entry, nonrenewable. So I went, did a few stories, and waited another few months for my next visa.

During one period, the only way I could get in was to apply for conferences, which were sponsored by powerful organizations working to build their profiles. Most of the events were hugely boring, packed with dull panels about increasing competitiveness and building a knowledge economy, but once I was in, I could work as I pleased.

At one point, I received a visa—one month, single entry, nonrenewable—to attend a two-day conference, but its organization was so poor that I didn’t receive the visa until the day the conference began. I flew to Saudi Arabia that evening, attended the conference’s second day, and had 29 days left, during which officials I called refused to speak to me because I was not there to do interviews.

Journalistic access improved after Salman became king. Transparency was a talking point of the MBS era, and that affected openness with journalists, at least initially. I did some stories the Saudis liked. I traveled to Buraidah, a staunchly conservative town, and wrote about how clerics intervened in death penalty cases to save criminals from getting their heads chopped off. I wrote about a long-running program at the National Guard Hospital in Riyadh that separated conjoined twins who came from poor families around the world. After those were published, I got a new visa—three months, multi-entry, nonrenewable—which felt luxurious.

As 2016 got under way, momentum built toward the release of MBS’s grand plan for the future of Saudi Arabia. Consultants had been heavily involved in it at all levels, and a think tank associated with McKinsey had produced a report diagnosing the challenges facing the kingdom and proposing a range of fixes. It was seen as a trial balloon for various initiatives under consideration.

Then Saudi officials and the local news media began talking about the National Transformation Plan, MBS’s road map for the future that was being drawn up by McKinsey. After its release was delayed several times, MBS commissioned a competing firm, Boston Consulting Group, to create an alternative document to launch his proposed reforms. It was called “Vision 2030,” and a date was finally set for its release, the week after my visa expired. The guys at the Information Ministry told me I would get an extension, but it never came, so I left. Two days later they called late at night to say they wanted me to cover the launch. They did get me a new visa—five years, multi-entry, nonrenewable—but it was issued the day of the big event, so I put the visa in my passport and watched the release on TV from my office in Beirut.

The vision itself was an extensive document, with subheads and bullet points detailing how MBS planned to restructure Saudi Arabia’s economy and change the lifestyles of its citizens. It was grandiose and optimistic, packed with targets.

“We will begin immediately delivering the overarching plans and programs we have set out,” its forward declared. “Together, with the help of Allah, we can strengthen the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s position as a great nation in which we should all feel an immense pride.”

The kingdom would take advantage of its place in the Arab and Islamic worlds, transform itself into a global investment giant, and establish itself as a hub for Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sector by sector, the vision laid out what would change. Aramco would grow from an oil company into an energy conglomerate. The kingdom would create a mining industry to employ Saudis, manufacture its own military equipment, and offer improved health, housing, and educational services. There would be recycling, e-government, and renewable energy.

The vision acknowledged, remarkably, that Saudi Arabia wasn’t a very fun place to live.

“We are well aware that the cultural and entertainment opportunities currently available do not reflect the rising aspirations of our citizens and residents, nor are they in harmony with our prosperous economy,” it said.

So the kingdom would expand entertainment and encourge Saudis to exercise.

The Vision may have been written by foreign consultants, but when it came time for the rollout, it all belonged to MBS. The day of its release, he gave an extensive television interview, throwing around gigantic numbers and speaking about what his plan meant not just for Saudi Arabia, but for “planet Earth.” The kingdom had “an oil addiction” that had impeded development, but that would end soon.

“I think that by 2020, if the oil stops, we’ll be able to live,” he said. “We need it. We needed it. But I think that in 2020 we’ll be able to live without oil.”

The privatization of Aramco was on the way, he said, through “the biggest IPO in the history of the world.” The holdings of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund would be so great that it would be “an essential mover on planet Earth.” A proposed bridge across the Red Sea between Saudi Arabia and Egypt would become “the most important land crossing in the world.”

It was ambitious, heady stuff, and many of my Saudi friends welcomed the prospect of great change. But in mapping out all the needed reforms, the Vision detailed how poorly the kingdom had been run and how ill-prepared its citizens were to participate in a diversified economy. Would a country that was ready to blast off in the way that MBS described need to “build a culture that rewards determination, provides opportunities for all, and helps everyone acquire the necessary skills to achieve their personal goals”?

The plan also made light of the huge challenges its implementation would face. The kingdom was decades behind its neighbors in building the infrastructure to be a regional hub. And it had a deficit of human capital, both in terms of skills and work ethic. There was little industrial base that was not connected to oil, and no domestic working class to speak of. Foreigners held nearly all the blue-collar jobs. They held many of the white-collar jobs, too.

Critics dismissed the Vision as an exercise in personal branding by MBS or as hugely unrealistic, like an obese man with no college degree announcing his intention to become a vegan triathlete tech pioneer. There was reason to doubt. I remember thinking at the time that at least MBS was planning a positive future for his country. That was more than one could say for most other Arab leaders. But as my experience with the visa operation had shown, the kingdom’s bureaucracy had a long way to go to function as MBS planned.

A ROLE FOR JOURNALISM

SOON AFTER MOHAMMED bin Salman released his vision for the future of Saudi Arabia, he held a private reception for the leading lights of Saudi society. They broke down into two groups. First were the clerics, but not the stuffy, elderly scholars whom young Saudis mocked for their fatwas condemning Pokémon or forbidding photos with cats. These were younger, tech-savvy clerics whose moves young Saudis tracked like Western kids followed Hollywood stars. One hosted a popular television show. Another had been the first black man to lead prayers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Yet another was referred to as the Brad Pitt of Saudi clerics because of his luscious lips.

They had not always had easy relationships with the authorities. One was the same cleric King Abdullah had fired for criticizing his co-ed university. Others had been thrown in prison, kicked off of television, or put under house arrest for preaching that strayed outside of the ever-shifting red lines. But the assets they brought to the meeting were clear: millions of followers on Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. MBS knew well that no other group of Saudis could so easily land Vision 2030 on the screens of so many cellphones across the kingdom.

The other group were intellectuals and journalists who played a role in shaping Saudi public opinion by telegraphing the kingdom’s views and letting the people know how their leaders viewed regional and international issues. Among them was a large, mild-mannered journalist named Jamal Khashoggi, the same man who had briefed the American diplomat years before on the looming challenge to the monarchy.

Khashoggi was in his late fifties, and his life had traversed the most significant social trends in Saudi Arabia. He would end up playing a larger role in MBS’s trajectory than anyone else in the room that day.

He was born in the holy city of Medina to an elite family in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia. His grandfather was a doctor who had treated MBS’s grandfather. Another relative was the famous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, whose lavish, billionaire lifestyle had filled magazine spreads.

He did not share his uncle’s wealth, but he grew up comfortably in Jeddah, whose historic role as a transit point for pilgrims heading to Mecca made it the kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city. He had gone to the United States for college, earning a degree in business administration from Indiana State University in 1983. It was there that he became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist organization that seeks to embed its version of Islam in the lives of its followers—and in the states where they live.

Khashoggi was devout and joined an usra, or “family,” the basic unit of Brotherhood life that operated like a Bible study, combining religious and social activities. It was not uncommon at the time for young Saudis to fall in with the Brotherhood while abroad. They were prominent in Muslim student associations across the United States, including the Muslim Arab Youth Association that Khashoggi joined. And he would have found their style familiar, since Brotherhood members had played a large role in building the Saudi education system. One year, he ran the book fair at the association’s U.S. national conference.

After university, Khashoggi worked as a journalist for Arab News, an English-language newspaper in Jeddah, and other publications, which gave him an opportunity to cover the biggest international story of the day for Saudi Arabia: the Afghan jihad.

The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and the United States and Saudi Arabia had intervened to push it back, each for its own reasons. The United States saw Afghanistan as a new front in the Cold War, while Saudi Arabia and others in the Muslim world considered the Soviet invasion an infidel attack on a Muslim land. So the two countries joined forces, the CIA working with Saudi intelligence to fund and arm the holy warriors, or mujahideen.

The Afghan jihad stirred the passions of young men across the Arab world in the same way the Spanish Civil War had inspired Westerners such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Saudi royals paid for young Saudis to join the fight, and Khashoggi rode the wave as a journalist. During reporting trips to Afghanistan, he donned local clothes and traveled with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar and theorist of jihad. Once, he sat next to him in the crowded backseat of a car to protect the famous cleric from potential attacks. He had his photo taken holding a Kalashnikov (to the consternation of his editor back home). There is no record of Khashoggi fighting, but his sympathy for the cause was clear and won him an invitation from another young Saudi who was making a name for himself in Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden had also grown up in Jeddah, a son of a wealthy contractor who had built much of the kingdom’s infrastructure, including many royal palaces and the compounds around the holy sites. Instead of seeking a role in the family business, bin Laden had used his wealth to set up a training camp in Afghanistan for the so-called “Afghan Arabs” flocking to join the jihad. Bin Laden wanted to spread the word, and invited Khashoggi to write about the place. In an article for Arab News in 1988, Khashoggi trumpeted its transnational Islamic identity:

Maasadat Al-Ansar, Afghanistan—Muslims are one nation. Despite geographical barriers, political squabbles and differences in color and language, they consider themselves brothers. This unique brotherhood is clearly manifested in the attitude of those Arab youths who have joined the Afghan Mujahedeen in their indefatigable struggle against the Communist forces.

Khashoggi described bin Laden as “a famous Saudi contractor” who had become “one of the foremost leaders of the Arab muhahedeen in Afghanistan” and quoted him describing glorious battles.

“We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions all around us,” bin Laden told him. “War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty.”

Khashoggi also spoke with Jalaluddin Haqqani, who laid out the idea of transnational jihad that would later drive both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

“We are proud of these Arab youths,” Haqqani said of the camp’s recruits. “These Arabs now know the requirements of mujahedeen and will serve as ambassadors of jihad in their own countries when they return.”

Bin Laden, of course, would go on to found Al Qaeda and plot catastrophic attacks in the United States and elsewhere, while Haqqani would head the Haqqani Network, a designated terrorist organization associated with Al Qaeda. But in the late 1980s, the two men were seen as Muslim folk heroes, taking up arms against injustice.

But as the war descended into factional fighting and warlordism, Khashoggi’s dream that the Afghan jihad would improve life in the country collapsed.

“He was disappointed that after all the struggle that happened, the Afghans never got it together,” a Saudi colleague recalled. “The infighting, he always talked about that.”

When American commandos killed bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Khashoggi mourned, not for bin Laden, but for the dashed hope he had once embodied.

“I collapsed into tears a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah,” Khashoggi wrote on Twitter, using a nickname for bin Laden. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and rage.”

The failure of the Afghan jihad was the first of several political heartbreaks for Khashoggi.

KHASHOGGI RETURNED TO Saudi Arabia and kept writing, a cordial, devout man who led prayers in the office at Arab News. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Khashoggi drove through the desert to cover the war, running into fleeing Kuwaiti forces who almost shot him before realizing he was Saudi.

He was promoted to editor, which pushed him into a higher level of society, attending private meetings with officials and royals and traveling with the king. But while serving the monarchy, he kept in touch with Islamists around the Arab world and pushed for another private passion: democracy.

In 1992, the Algerian military barred an Islamist party that had won parliamentary elections from taking power, another political heartbreak for Khashoggi. So he and a friend from the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam Tamimi, founded a group called “Friends of Democracy in Algeria,” which placed ads in British newspapers promoting its cause. The group later broadened its mandate to promoting human rights around the Middle East. Tamimi was its public face, while Khashoggi raised funds behind the scenes.

Khashoggi developed a close relationship with Prince Turki al-Faisal, a son of Saudi Arabia’s third king, who headed the kingdom’s intelligence agency. That relationship, and Khashoggi’s trips to Afghanistan, fueled speculation that Khashoggi was an intelligence agent operating under journalistic cover. Prince Turki and Khashoggi’s friends denied it, but several acknowledged that he did favors for the Saudis. In 2005, for instance, a group of Western officials met in Beirut with leaders from Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement, and the Saudis sent Khashoggi to be their eyes in the meeting. There was nothing suspicious about it at the time, because most Arab Islamists did not consider Saudi Arabia a hostile power.

Despite his early admiration for bin Laden, Khashoggi was ahead of many in the kingdom in recognizing the danger of Al Qaeda and how Saudi Arabia’s intolerance had contributed to the weaponization of Islam. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Saudi officials denied that Saudi citizens had led the plot and conspiracy theories coursed through the kingdom that “the Jews” were behind it. Khashoggi never bought them, placing the blame squarely on those he accused of perverting Islam.

“Osama bin Laden’s hijacked planes not only attacked New York and Washington, they also attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches,” he wrote.

Over the next decade, debates on social issues raged between liberals and conservatives inside the kingdom, and Khashoggi was a staunch campaigner for the reformist camp. He was appointed editor of Al Watan newspaper and used it to push for women’s rights while criticizing the power of the religious establishment. He didn’t last long. After Al Qaeda bombings killed twenty-five people in Riyadh in 2003, Khashoggi penned an editorial attacking not only the terrorists, but the clerics who gave them cover.

“Those who committed yesterday’s crime, which will have a painful impact on the peaceful nature of our nation, are not only the suicide bombers,’’ he wrote, “but also everyone who instigated or justified the attacks, everyone who called them mujahideen.”

He was fired after less than two months. He received death threats, so Prince Turki, who had been named ambassador to the United Kingdom, took Khashoggi along as a media adviser. A few years later, Turki was named ambassador to Washington, and Khashoggi followed him there, too. Those two jobs helped Khashoggi build a network of contacts among Western journalists and officials he would keep in touch with over the years. While in the United States, he bought a condo near Tysons Corner in Virginia, where he would seek refuge later in life.

He returned home in 2007, where tempers had cooled since his last attempt at domestic journalism. He got his old job back at Al Watan and resumed the reformist fight. To expose what he saw as the backwardness of the kingdom’s education system, he published a question from a government textbook—“How can you identify a woman who can breed more children?”—and solicited answers from “experts” to show the question’s absurdity.

He was an early advocate for women driving, a topic so hot that he could not address it directly in the newspaper. So he did it obliquely, publishing an article that imagined a girl riding a camel to the university and the chaos that ensued. There was no place for her to park, the police weren’t sure how to react, and neither were Saudi drivers, since—as with driving—there was no law that explicitly prohibited girls from riding camels. In subsequent weeks, he published similar articles, imagining a girl riding a bicycle, then a donkey. The articles provoked controversy, and Khashoggi got fired again.

His career broadened out. He became a regular commentator on Saudi and Arab talk shows and published widely, writing a column for Al Hayat, an international Arabic newspaper based in London. Along the way, he maintained his ties to the Saudi power structure and communicated the kingdom’s views to the world.

For most of his career, he was not a reporter in the Western sense, as in a journalist who dug up facts to hold reluctant powers accountable. More accurately, he was an i’laami, Arabic for a “media figure,” who wrote, ran newspapers, and appeared on television as much to transmit the government’s views as to promote his own. Sometimes, that meant writing for cash, as when a contact wired him $100,000 in 2009 to do a sympathetic interview with Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia.

At times, his own views diverged from those of the Saudi leadership, especially after the Arab Spring uprisings spread across the Middle East in 2011. Khashoggi was moved by the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who had set himself on fire after a confrontation with the police, becoming a symbol of how repressive regimes dashed the hopes of young Arabs. As the uprisings spread, Khashoggi was optimistic that the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria would pave the way for democracy.

But he maintained a Saudi view of other uprisings. He opposed protests against Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy by the island nation’s Shiite majority, and he supported the Saudi military intervention in Yemen as necessary to check Iran’s ambitions.

The Arab Spring ran off course—another heartbreak for Khashoggi. Egypt collapsed into chaos followed by a military coup, Yemen fell apart, and the Islamic State rose in Iraq and Syria.

It was during this period that I got to know Khashoggi. He was in his mid-fifties then, a tall, rotund man with droopy eyes and an easy manner who cared deeply about the region, liked to discuss ideas, and seemingly never got angry. His media prominence had made him a household name in the Arab world, and he seemed to live on airplanes, traipsing between foreign capitals for meetings and conferences while juggling multiple cellphones that never stopped ringing. Like other foreign journalists working in the region, I took to phoning him regularly to get his thoughts, knowing that, unlike other prominent Saudis, he usually answered his phone.

I kept track of his views. When the Islamic State was at its peak, he spoke of how its ideology overlapped with the kingdom’s.

“Islam itself is in crisis today,” he told me in 2014. “We thought we had settled the issues of modernization, relations with the West, the world, women, democracy, and elections. But they are back again and open for debate, and it is ISIS who has brought them back.”

Along the way, he served as an adviser to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the flamboyant billionaire investor who shared Khashoggi’s desire for social reform in the kingdom. The prince funded a new Arabic television station and tapped Khashoggi to run it. But the project didn’t work out. In February 2015, Alarab television went live with a talk show on which a prominent member of Bahrain’s opposition criticized the island kingdom’s royal family. Within hours, it was off the air.

After Salman became king, Khashoggi lauded him as a strong leader and argued that the Arabs should rely less on the United States for security. He penned a widely read column called “The Salman Doctrine” that laid out the new king’s foreign policy, criticizing what he saw as American resistance to acknowledge the threat posed by Iran.

His opinions sometimes got him attacked online, but he stuck to them and said he was grateful that Saudi Arabia allowed open discussion.

“In the Arab world, everyone thinks journalists cannot be independent, but I represent myself, which is the right thing to do. What would I be worth if I succumbed to pressure to change my opinions? The atmosphere of freedom must be preserved, and I am happy that my government is doing so,” he wrote. “The world cannot bring down someone who is free on the inside. I want to be free, to think freely and write freely. I am free to do so.”

Khashoggi’s inclusion in MBS’s meeting with the clerics and intellectuals in 2016 showed that he mattered, that the kingdom’s rising new leader saw him as a voice worth winning over. MBS told the assembled men about his economic plans and spoke about politics, warning of Iran’s growing influence in Sudan, Pakistan, and Djibouti.

When Khashoggi’s turn came to speak, he asked MBS why he did not speak about such issues publicly.

You are the journalists, the prince said. If you want to write about it, go ahead.

The men had convened after the sunset prayer, and the conversation continued until they performed the last prayer of the day together. It was Khashoggi’s first brush with MBS, and he came away believing he had been given a mandate to write about, and even critique, the prince’s reforms. He wrote later that year: “This is also what the man of the Vision, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, promised in a meeting that brought together intellectuals, saying, ‘There will be a role for journalism in monitoring its implementation.’ And we as journalists want that role.”

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