The Man Behind The Plan

By Scott Macleod/Riyadh With Reporting by Jamil Hamad and Simon Robinson/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington

Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has rounded up a few brothers, sons and friends for a weekend game of lawn bowling. Wearing a Bedouin robe and an incongruous pair of striped Adidas running shoes, the ruler--in fact if not in name--of Saudi Arabia hurls a ball down the turf and coaches a TIME correspondent in the finer points of the sport. "Be careful of the topography," he warns, using his palm to illustrate the hazards. "Even a slight grade can send the ball off course."

It is that type of wary caution that has typified Saudi rulers since the birth of the kingdom 70 years ago. Until recently, Abdullah was as careful as the rest. These days however, the Crown Prince seems to be disregarding his own advice, throwing the ball off course with deliberation.

With a new Middle East peace initiative, he seems determined to play a more open and assertive role in regional affairs than any other Saudi leader has before him. At home, too, he appears to be coming into his own as a leader, advocating change, albeit slowly, in this most conservative of countries. During two days of meetings with TIME, which included rare visits to his private office, home and horse farm, Abdullah, 78, acknowledged many of Saudi Arabia's ills and discussed his plans for reform. "We have gone through shock and denial," says a Saudi official. "Now we're asking, 'Do we need to change?'"

Abdullah's leaking of a peace initiative to the New York Times was plainly part of a well-plotted charm campaign to improve Saudi Arabia's image in the light of its connections to Sept. 11. But the proposition has generated enormous attention worldwide, far exceeding the expectations of the Saudis themselves. Abdullah's offering is simple: he proposes that all the Arab countries state in advance that they will make peace with Israel if Israel relinquishes the lands it conquered in the 1967 war--that is, if it returns the Golan Heights to Syria and hands over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. That equation, "land for peace," is as old as U.N. Resolution 242, passed in 1967, which the Saudis had already embraced by attending the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. But this is the first time the Saudis have explicitly defined "peace" as full normalization between Israel and all Arab states.

In the current environment, with the Israelis and Palestinians killing one another and no one so much as discussing a cease-fire, Abdullah's "statement of vision" was at least something. Last week the latest Palestinian suicide bomber killed nine Israelis in Jerusalem. Israeli army incursions into two Palestinian refugee camps left 20 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers dead. Abdullah's initiative prompted the Bush Administration to dispatch CIA chief George Tenet and Middle East special envoy William Burns to Jiddah to take the matter up with the Crown Prince in person. The European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana made the same stop the day before. Every key Arab state except Syria has voiced support for Abdullah's "vision," making the Crown Prince confident he will win official backing at an Arab League summit later this month.

Even the Israelis could not entirely dismiss the initiative, despite the fact that its terms are unacceptable to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. To the Times, Abdullah spoke of "full withdrawal from all occupied territories...including in Jerusalem." Israel insists on keeping parts of the territories, and Sharon rejects any Israeli pullback in Jerusalem. The Saudis might be more flexible on these points than Abdullah indicated; Saudi officials now say the kingdom would endorse any border compromises acceptable to the Palestinians and Syrians. In any event, Sharon invited Abdullah to explain his ideas in detail. He insisted that before Israel would judge Abdullah's offering, Saudi Arabia and Israel must talk directly. (They never have.)

The Saudis insist on the opposite order; they aren't interested in talks unless Sharon endorses Abdullah's vision. In any event, the Saudis say they have nothing more to add. They have no interest in the laborious--and until now unsuccessful--work of hammering out details of a peace accord. "We are not in the real estate or zoning business," says the Crown Prince's foreign policy adviser Adel Jubeir. According to Arab diplomats, Abdullah has two immediate objectives. One is to lure the U.S. back into its old role as mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians, a function President Bush has largely abandoned. The second is to give Israelis hope in the peace process, so that they will throw Sharon out of office and elect a more moderate leader. That objective seemed somewhat farfetched; Abdullah's initiative created little popular enthusiasm in Israel.

For his part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat publicly supported Abdullah, though a senior official of the Palestinian Authority says that privately Arafat worries that the Saudi initiative is just meaningless talk. The consensus within the Authority, this source notes, is that Abdullah was less interested in helping the Palestinians than in improving Saudi Arabia's image.

Certainly there is work to be done. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Abdullah has sent clear signals--albeit in the quiet, gradual Saudi way--that Saudis must face the rot in their own society. One after another, he called in groups of Saudi imams, teachers, journalists and businessmen and warned them against taking Saudi Arabia's puritanical creed of religion, known as Wahhabism, to unacceptable extremes. Though not to Washington's complete satisfaction, Abdullah began tightening up on potential terrorist financing, scrutinizing Islamic charities and freezing some suspect bank accounts, an explosive issue in a culture that fiercely guards privacy.

When Abdullah's half-brother King Fahd, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995, was running things, the Islamic establishment had free rein. As a result, it has grown in strength to the point that Saudi leaders generally are terrified of confronting it. But Abdullah seems to have the confidence to take a tougher approach. His assuredness is rooted in part in his popular standing. These days, no other prince can compete with him in popularity. He is widely regarded as straight talking and above corruption, especially compared with some of his conspicuously super-rich brothers.

Make no mistake, the Crown Prince enjoys his royal perks. He rides around in a Rolls-Royce with plates that read 001 or else a customized tour bus with a small living room complete with satellite TV. His ranch is surprisingly modest but features a collection of some of the world's finest Arabian and thoroughbred horses. His main meal, at 7 p.m. sharp, is a sumptuous banquet of Arabic and Continental cuisine.

Saudis nonetheless regard Abdullah, an energetic man despite his considerable girth, as a dedicated, in-touch ruler. Each day he rises around noon, a common practice among Saudis, who often prefer to work in the cooler nights. Abdullah greets visiting dignitaries, emissaries and ordinary citizens until his 7 p.m. meal, naps until midnight and then puts in another day's work until dawn prayers. Though a devout Muslim, if he's a zealot about anything it's TV news: his office has a bank of 33 television sets so he can monitor all the available satellite channels at once. In contrast to more remote royals, Abdullah has become a populist prince, touring the country and even munching burgers in fast-food joints.

A popular touch can be useful as Abdullah goes about tackling entrenched problems. During Fahd's 20-year reign, government spending soared, while oil revenues declined from $40 per bbl. in 1980 to about $20 today. Abdullah has set out to shake the kingdom of its dependence on oil, which produces 70% of the nation's wealth. He has spearheaded the most significant attempt at economic restructuring in the kingdom's history, opening negotiations with American and other Western energy powers on a $100 billion foreign-investment project to develop natural gas and build related electricity and water-desalination plants.

At the same time, Abdullah has slashed government budgets. In February, he warned bureaucrats that they faced dismissal if they didn't perform effectively, a shocking declaration in a system that once assured every college graduate a government desk and a paycheck, work or no work. The 30,000-strong royal family wasn't spared the belt tightening: no more ignoring telephone and utility bills, he decreed, or treating the national carrier Saudia like a private airline.

Some of Abdullah's reforms are still blocked by Islamic opposition. His efforts to bring the kingdom into the World Trade Organization, for example, could help create jobs, and unemployment is 15%. But the obstacles to membership include the country's lack of appropriate commercial and insurance laws. Islamic traditionalists regard such laws as an affront to Shari'a, the rules of life that, according to Muslim tradition, were handed down by God.

Abdullah faces similar difficulties when it comes to issues like gender, sex and education. In 1999 Abdullah declared that the country would "open all doors" so that women could play a greater role in society. But to this day, Saudi women are entirely forbidden to drive and are prohibited from traveling by plane without the permission of a male guardian. Abdullah has approved a population-control campaign to address what may be the gravest long-term threat to stability, a birthrate unofficially put at 4.2%, one of the world's highest. Yet fearing the wrath of religious leaders, who claim that Islamic teaching calls for large families, he has limited the program to giving the green light to newspapers and intellectuals to start raising the issue.

There are some things that even the relatively progressive Abdullah wouldn't want to change. He gives no indication, for instance, that he plans to introduce democracy to the kingdom, whose national assembly comprises 120 appointees. It is just after evening prayers when Abdullah sits back in a stuffed chair for a three-hour discussion of the challenges the kingdom faces. As he chain-smokes his way through a pack of Vantage cigarettes, his bottom line is that change will come, but at a Saudi pace. "It is more rational to change gradually," he explains. "There is less disruption to the social balance." Even a reforming al Saud, it seems, can't escape that wary caution.

--With reporting by Jamil Hamad and Simon Robinson/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington