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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday May 18 2003 04.17 BST
The men's treatment ought to have made their imprisonment notorious. They were accused of running drinking dens in Riyadh, an illegal business but one the Saudi authorities used to tolerate. They were jailed after Christopher Rodway, an engineer from Gloucester, was killed in 2000 by a car bomb. Other attacks on Western targets followed. Everyone knew the bombings were the work of bin Ladenists.
But the Saudi monarchy couldn't admit that Western workers faced assassination by religious fanatics, as faith in the kingdom's 'stability' would be destroyed. Cottle and the rest were duly rounded up and what was a religious war between the corrupt fundamentalists of the Saudi monarchy and the murderous fundamentalists of al-Qaeda was presented as a turf war between bootleggers.
The suspects were paraded on Saudi television. They had clearly been tortured. Sandy Mitchell looked blank and drained. He recited ungrammatical lines as if to emphasise that he wasn't a native English speaker confessing freely. 'The explosion was directed against Mr Christopher Rodway, who is a British nationality,' he said in a stilted voice. The Moscow show trials carried greater conviction. Two of the six were sentenced to be beheaded and the rest were imprisoned for 18 years.
This was a cracking story for journalists. Brits were to be executed in what the Riyadh locals call 'chop-chop square'. Our boys had been fitted-up to hide the crimes of al-Qaeda, which, after 11 September 2001, were something of a hot news item. For a year after their arrests, journalists couldn't get anyone involved to talk to them. Amnesty International battered away at the case, but with the prisoners' families keeping silent, reporters could do little.
The Foreign Office had told the relatives to hold their tongues for fear of upsetting the monarchy. Mary Martini, ex-wife of James Cottle, told me that when she met Jack Straw in Whitehall he warned her of the dangers of speaking out. 'Quiet diplomacy' and a 'softly-softly' approach were best. If she made a fuss, she would 'back the Saudis into a corner'. Martini broke her silence last year, but most of the families have kept quiet.
According to Martini, several remain convinced that if they protest, their husbands will die. If some or all of the prisoners are released, then Straw could claim that quiet diplomacy had had its reward. But I suspect that the main reason for freeing them would be that last week's suicide bombings have made it impossible to maintain the pretence that 'stable' Saudi Arabia was threatened by nothing more than boozers fighting over drinking dens.
It was looking threadbare long before. Earlier this month Jane's Defence Weekly produced a list of assassinations of police officers, incitements from preachers to attack the West and anti-US riots. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, described in the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, how 80 per cent of hits on an al-Qaeda website came from inside Saudi Arabia. The United Nations Security Council estimated that $500 million had been passed from Saudis to al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
The monarchy and bin Laden may be enemies, but the best way to understand Saudi fundamentalism is to see them as a continuum. The monarchy used oil wealth to export Wahhabism, their brutish version of Islam, around the world. Al-Qaeda meanwhile drew most of the cultists who died on 11 September and most of its money from Saudi Arabia. State-sponsored Wahhabism provided the justification for jihad. With al-Qaeda, the monarchy is being hoist with its own petard.
Saudi Arabia is an infuriated and dangerous country, but as the cases of James Cottle and his fellow prisoners show, the true nature of the regime and its angry subjects has barely penetrated popular consciousness in Britain. You can't accuse the Foreign Office of not doing its best to warn expatriates of threat to their lives in the weeks before the suicide bombing. The real charge is that Britain's corrupt relationship with Saudi Arabia has led Whitehall and other Western governments to downplay the fundamentalist turmoil.
In Britain's case the corruption wasn't 'all about oil,' but all about bombs. Between 1986 and 1988 Britain signed the al-Yamamah arms deals, which authorised what was probably the biggest weapons sale in history. The scale of the deal was staggering. By the mid-1990s, Saudi Arabia, a country of just 13 million people, was accounting for 75 per cent of total UK arms sales.
Just about everything else to do with al-Yamamah has been kept secret. After this newspaper published accusations in 1989 that bribes had been given and taken by both the Saudi royal family and 'British citizens with close contacts to the government', the National Audit Office launched an investigation. Its report was not released. In fact, many MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, which is meant to supervise the NAO, were not allowed to read it either. Jonathon Aitken lied through his teeth in his libel case against the Guardian to cover up the fact that John Major had made him the Minister responsible for supervising arms procurement, even though he had been up to his neck in arms deals with Saudi Arabia.
You can say with certainty that the people of Saudi Arabia haven't benefited. Their money has been pocketed by 'middlemen' and channelled overseas to become the lifeblood of the British arms industry. Without al-Yamamah there wouldn't be much of a British arms industry.
There's a bluff common-sensical view which is usually dignified with the label 'pragmatism' or 'realism' that mimsy ethical considerations cannot stand in the way of business. But the result of 'realism' towards Saudi Arabia has been to blind us to the reality of one of the most frightening countries in the world.
