When Reagan became president, he held Prince Bandar at a distance, though Nancy Reagan took his counsel on the choice of national security adviser, which seems highly inappropriate. Under Bush the First, Ottaway writes, Prince Bandar became practically an adjunct member of the cabinet, dining and hunting with officials and enjoying a regular racquetball game with Colin Powell, to whom he later gave a Jaguar. Bush, says the author, felt comfy enough with the Saudi to ask him to lobby OPEC to raise oil prices. (The president, remember, was a former oilman, and the industry was hurting.) Prince Bandar complied and achieved the desired result.

Prince Bandar’s influence reached a peak in the heady days of planning the gulf war of 1991. “He was in and out of the White House, Pentagon, and State Department at all times of day and night,” Ottaway writes. Prince Bandar was even given access to State’s underground parking garage; he also learned to eat takeout pizza during a crisis, American-style. The prince, whose idea of a break was to relax at a 56,000-square-foot ranch in Aspen, with its “legion of servants” and room for 100 guests, thought it ironic that the leaders of the richest nation on earth dined on fast food. The cultural clashes in this relationship were everywhere. Prince Bandar did not exactly deny the gross corruption of the Saudi royal family but trenchantly observed, as if to question America’s moral superiority, that in his country at least, the poor neither lacked for health care nor slept in the streets.

But the gulf war, by expanding U.S. visibility in Saudi Arabia, inflamed the kingdom’s radicals and led inexorably to 9/11. In this fascinating part of the story, the stronger the Saudi-American bond became, the more restive—and threatening—the internal Saudi opposition became.

Prince Bandar’s influence waned during the Clinton years, though it didn’t disappear. At times his style was too personal, and his habit of promising more than he could deliver from his king slowly eroded his standing.

Nonetheless, in 2001, Prince Bandar was about to wrest from Bush the Second a statement in support of Palestinian statehood—for the prince, a major coup. Then terrorists attacked New York and Washington, and his life’s work went up in smoke. The news that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals destroyed the fragile Saudi-American friendship. Though still desirous of Saudi cooperation, Americans would now view the Saudis and their radical Wahhabi Islam with suspicion. And when the U.S. invaded Iraq, destabilizing the kingdom’s neighbor and creating a power vacuum that Iran seemed happy to fill, the Saudis discovered, to their horror, that the partner they had counted on to provide stability in the region had become a force—certainly in the short term—for insecurity instead.