CIA chief met Saudi crown prince last month in push to mend ties

The visit last month yielded a ‘good conversation, better tone,’ says a US official.

William Burns testifies to the Senate intelligence committee. Picture: AFP

CIA director William Burns made an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia last month to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as the Biden administration pushes to repair ties with a key Middle East security partner.

The visit took place in the coastal city of Jeddah, where the Saudi leadership spent much of Ramadan. While details of what the two men discussed weren’t available, recent sources of US-Saudi tension include oil production, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Iran nuclear deal and the war in Yemen.

“It was a good conversation, better tone than prior US government engagements,” one American official said of the meeting with Mohammed, who runs Saudi Arabia’s daily affairs on behalf of his 86-year-old ­father, King Salman.

Mr Burns is a former deputy secretary of state who studied Arabic and held postings in the Middle East, as well as having prior experience in covert diplomacy. During the Obama ­administration, he helped lead secret talks with Iran that led to a multination accord in 2015 to limit Tehran’s nuclear development in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

He travelled to Saudi Arabia with the relationship between Washington and Riyadh at its lowest point in decades, with then presidential candidate Joe Biden saying in 2019 the kingdom should be treated like a pariah over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

A US intelligence assessment, released last year by Mr Biden, determined that Mohammed ­approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi, which led to his 2018 murder and dismemberment inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Mohammed has denied involvement in the killing and told Mr Biden’s national security ­adviser in September that he never wanted to discuss the matter again. Since then, Saudi Arabia has rebuffed US requests to pump more oil to tame prices and undercut Moscow’s war ­finances, keeping in line with Russian interests.

The visit preceded that last week by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who after the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi put Mohammed’s feet to the fire by revealing macabre details of the killing.

Political fissures between the US and Saudi Arabia have deepened since Russia invaded Ukraine, senior officials from both governments have said. The risk for the US is Riyadh will align more closely with China and Russia, or at least remain neutral on issues of interest to Washington, as it has on Ukraine.

Multiple US officials have visited the kingdom repeatedly in the past year to try to heal the breach, with an eye to addressing Saudi concerns about security threats from Iran and the Houthi rebels that Iran backs in Yemen. Yet with Mr Biden opposed to any broad concessions to the Saudis, the officials have ­acknowledged making only modest progress.

The Wall Street Journal