Saudi ambassador to US keeps his head in face of outlandish plot

OPINION: For months Adel al-Jubeir knew he was the target of an assassination plot – but he couldn't tell anyone

THERE WERE women who lost their heads over Adel al-Jubeir, back when the Saudi ambassador to the US was a charming playboy. I had the opposite experience. He saved me from losing my head.

In 2002, I was walking around a luxury mall in Riyadh with Al-Jubeir, a cosmopolitan graduate of the University of North Texas and Georgetown University, when the robed, bearded religious police bore down on us, pointing at me and scolding in Arabic. “They say they can see the outline of your body,” Al-Jubeir translated.

It took a surprisingly long time, given his stature as a top adviser to the future King Abdullah, but he talked the mutawwa out of beheading or lashing me, or whatever pound of flesh they wanted to exact because they saw an inch of flesh.

Given that his father was a diplomat too – one of the first Saudis to have a college degree – maybe the 49-year-old’s equanimity is in his genes. He is far more understated than his flamboyant predecessor, Prince Bandar, who was so plugged into the Bush dynasty he was known as “Bandar Bush”.

Al-Jubeir stayed cool, even when US officials informed him several months ago about the latest stunning chapter in the Saudi Arabia-versus-Iran Great Game for supremacy in the Middle East: an outlandish plot by an Iranian-American used-car dealer in Texas who said his cousin was a senior member of the Iranian Quds Force.

The car dealer wanted to recruit someone from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million (€1.08 million) to kill Al-Jubeir with a car bomb or at a Washington restaurant – no matter the collateral damage – but the bungler hired a paid Drug Enforcement Administration informant posing as a cartel hitman instead.

As evidence mounted of money transfers and taped conversations, Al-Jubeir accepted that, as US president Barack Obama said, the plot was “paid by and directed by individuals in the Iranian government”. Iran denies that, and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told journalist Fareed Zakaria: “Do we really need to kill the ambassador of a brotherly country?”

The ambassador had to force himself to live a normal existence for months, not telling family or staff, until a criminal complaint was unveiled and the Texas car dealer was before a judge.

Gathering his shaken staff in the embassy, he said: “Nothing befalls us except that which God has written for us. If anything, it should reinforce our resolve, otherwise the bad guys win.”

He got a standing ovation.

His family was “shocked” and his frightened twin nine-year-old daughters called his office to grill him. He reassured them that there was “a bad guy but no danger”. Still, they pressed: “Okay, when are you coming home?”

Over lunch at the embassy in his first interview since then, he told me in his whispery voice that he was surprised the plotters had assumed he would be hanging at modish restaurants. These days, the slender, smartly tailored ambassador is more of a nester, spending time with the twins and his nine-month-old son.

“I work so much, I enjoy sitting at home doing nothing,” said the diplomat with the rough commute – 12-hour flights to Riyadh several times a month.

I asked if he thought he was targeted because of his tough position on Iran, underscored in a 2008 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoting him reiterating that King Abdullah wanted the US to “cut off the head of the snake”.

“You should ask the perpetrators, not me,” he said wryly. “We do what we have to do, and we can’t let issues like this deter us.”

For centuries, the protection of emissaries has been a cardinal principle enshrined in relations between nations, even ones at war. If you kill envoys whose messages you don’t like, you end up with the law of the jungle.

The plot against Al-Jubeir was so bizarre that it spawned a bouquet of conspiracy theories, but many believe that if the plotters had recruited a criminal who was not a US informant, it could have succeeded and people might have assumed that it was al-Qaeda seeking revenge for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

It shows how little we know about Iran that there are two opposing theories about the motive: one, that Iranians engaged in an act of desperation because they are weak. Two, that Iranians engaged in an act of bravado because we are weak.

At first, Iran charged the US with fabricating the plot to distract from its economic woes.

Sceptics assert that Iran, ever more ideological and obsessed with restoring the glory of the Persian empire, has been emboldened by getting away with murder, literally, for three decades.

They suggest the US has let it off lightly on everything from the 1983 US embassy bombing in Beirut to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing to Iran’s meddling in Iraq, sending weapons and operatives to kill US soldiers.

Some worry that the US spends too much time hoping that Iran will become more reasonable when, in reality, it is trying to get nuclear weapons so it can become less reasonable.

News of the plot, denounced by the kingdom as “sinful and abhorrent,” has made Saudi Arabia more sympathetic in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of way. At a recent fete here, Al-Jubeir was thronged by politicians, diplomats and journalists, all asking how he was bearing up.

Some Saudi commentators demanded immediate measures against Iran. Asked about it, Al-Jubeir said: “You have to be deliberate.”

The Saudis had asked the UN to ensure “the perpetrators are accountable”, he said.

As I left, I asked the ambassador about the painting in his office of Arab tribesmen riding horses and camels.

“It’s artistic licence,” he noted with amusement. “Camels don’t ride with horses. They ride separately. Horses go faster and camels go longer.”