Tag: Saudi Arabia

  • The Safari Club: The Secret Intelligence Alliance That Bypassed Congress

    In 1976, Prince Turki Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency gave a speech at Georgetown University that contained a paragraph most of his audience probably didn’t fully process at the time. “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress,” he said. “It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.” That’s a former intelligence chief of a major U.S. ally publicly confirming that when the American Congress restricted the CIA’s ability to conduct covert operations, five countries built a parallel intelligence alliance to do it instead — funded by Saudi petrodollars, coordinated from a headquarters in Cairo, and operated with the full informal knowledge of senior American officials who couldn’t legally participate but could make sure nobody got in the way.

    Why it existed

    The Safari Club was a direct product of the Church Committee. In 1975, Senator Frank Church’s investigation exposed three decades of CIA abuses — coups, assassination plots, domestic surveillance, mail interception, drug experiments on unwitting subjects — and Congress responded with reforms that fundamentally constrained the agency’s operational freedom. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment required presidential authorization for covert actions. Executive orders banned assassination. Oversight committees gained authority to review operations before they happened. President Carter took office in 1977 pledging transparency, appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director, and Turner began cutting the agency’s covert action capabilities and shifting from human intelligence to signals collection.

    The constraints were real. The CIA couldn’t fund foreign militias without Congressional approval. It couldn’t run covert operations without paperwork that might leak. It couldn’t deploy personnel to theaters where exposure would trigger a political crisis. For a generation of intelligence professionals who had operated with essentially no oversight since 1947, the post-Church Committee CIA felt paralyzed. The phrase that circulated through Langley was that the agency had been “entombed.”

    The vacuum was filled by a French aristocrat. Count Alexandre de Marenches, director of France’s Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, had been watching Soviet-backed movements gain ground across Africa since Portugal abandoned its colonies in 1974 and Cuba deployed troops to Angola in 1975. De Marenches proposed a multilateral intelligence alliance — countries that shared anti-communist objectives and could pool resources for covert operations without the legal constraints that now bound the Americans. He recruited four partners: Saudi Arabia (money), Egypt (troops and weapons), Morocco (troops and weapons), and Iran under the Shah (personnel and regional reach). Algeria was invited and declined. In September 1976, the intelligence chiefs of the five participating nations — de Marenches, Saudi Arabia’s Kamal Adham, Egypt’s General Kamal Hassan Ali, Morocco’s General Ahmed Dlimi, and Iran’s General Nematollah Nassiri — met at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, an exclusive resort partly owned by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and signed an official charter establishing the alliance.

    How it operated

    The Safari Club built a permanent operations center in Cairo, authorized by President Sadat, with a secretariat, a planning wing, and an operations wing. The division of labor was informal but consistent: Saudi Arabia funded operations from its oil revenues, France provided high-end communications and security technology, and Egypt and Morocco supplied weapons, equipment, and military personnel for deployments. The alliance coordinated informally with American and Israeli intelligence — not through official channels, which would have triggered the oversight mechanisms Congress had just created, but through personal relationships between Safari Club members and senior U.S. officials who maintained deniable contact.

    The personal relationships were the mechanism. CIA Director George H.W. Bush — who served for one year before Turner replaced him — held a personal account at BCCI, the bank that had been consolidated simultaneously with the Safari Club’s creation and served as its primary financial conduit. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had direct knowledge of the Safari Club and worked to ensure it operated without obstruction. After Turner took over and began restricting CIA operations, Theodore Shackley — the agency’s legendary covert operations officer — and his deputy Thomas Clines maintained informal connections with the Safari Club, effectively running a “second CIA” that continued operating after the official one had been reined in. Peter Dale Scott, the political scientist who coined the term “deep state” in the American context, classified the Safari Club as part of this parallel intelligence infrastructure.

    The financial infrastructure was BCCI. As one account put it, “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations.” BCCI provided exactly that — a bank designed from inception to operate across jurisdictions without meaningful regulatory oversight, laundering money for intelligence agencies, dictators, and criminal organizations simultaneously. Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief who was a Safari Club founding member, was also a BCCI shareholder. The bank didn’t just serve the Safari Club’s enemies. It served everyone. The convergence of the Safari Club and BCCI at the same moment in the mid-1970s is not coincidental — both were responses to the same structural problem: how do you conduct covert operations when the formal channels have been shut down?

    What it did

    The Safari Club’s operational record spans three theaters and one diplomatic triumph. In Zaire, when the Front for the National Liberation of the Congo launched an invasion of Shaba Province in 1977 with Angolan and Cuban backing, the Safari Club organized the response. France airlifted Moroccan troops — 1,500 soldiers under direct orders from King Hassan II — and Egyptian personnel into the conflict zone, enabling Mobutu Sese Seko’s government to repel the invasion without any visible American involvement. A second Shaba crisis in 1978 drew a similar response. The operations successfully prevented Soviet-aligned forces from destabilizing a Western-allied regime in Central Africa.

    In the Horn of Africa, the Safari Club coordinated support for Somalia during the Ogaden War against Soviet-backed Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia funded and armed Somali forces while Egypt provided military equipment. The operation ultimately failed — Somalia lost the war — but the Club’s intervention demonstrated its capacity to mobilize military resources across a continent without American personnel on the ground.

    In Afghanistan, the Safari Club’s networks provided the prototype for what became the CIA’s Operation Cyclone — the massive arming of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union that began formally in 1980. Safari Club channels, particularly the Saudi-Pakistani intelligence relationship and the BCCI financial pipeline, were already in place when the Soviets invaded in 1979. The transition from Safari Club-era informal support to CIA-managed covert funding was not a clean break — it was a handoff, with the same personnel, the same banking infrastructure, and the same Saudi co-funding arrangements continuing under a different organizational header.

    The diplomatic achievement was the most consequential. Morocco had maintained intelligence back-channels with Israel since the 1950s. Using the Moroccan Safari Club representative as an intermediary, Israel communicated a warning to Egypt about a Libyan assassination plot against Sadat in 1977 — a gesture that opened the door to secret talks supervised by King Hassan II between Israeli general Moshe Dayan, Mossad director Yitzhak Hofi, and Egyptian intelligence. These talks led directly to Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, the Camp David Accords in 1978, and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979. The most significant diplomatic breakthrough of the Cold War era in the Middle East was brokered through an intelligence alliance that Congress didn’t know existed.

    Why it ended — and what it built

    The Iranian Revolution in 1979 removed one of the five founding members and destabilized the alliance’s structure. De Marenches retired in 1982. Egypt, having made peace with Israel, realigned directly with Washington. By the early 1980s, the Safari Club quietly dissolved — no formal termination, just attrition as the bilateral relationships it had coordinated became the normal operating channels for U.S.-allied intelligence cooperation.

    But the infrastructure survived. The Saudi-Pakistani intelligence relationship that the Safari Club formalized became the backbone of the Afghan mujahideen support network. BCCI continued operating as the financial conduit for covert operations until its spectacular collapse in 1991. The model itself — “get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails,” as journalist John K. Cooley described Kissinger’s approach — became the template for how the United States has conducted proxy operations ever since. The Wagner Group is Russia’s version of the same structural logic: outsource violence to a deniable entity so the state bears no formal responsibility. The Safari Club outsourced covert action to allied intelligence services. Wagner outsources it to a private military company. The mechanism differs. The deniability architecture is identical.

    The Safari Club matters because it demonstrates that when democratic oversight constrains a state’s intelligence apparatus, the apparatus doesn’t stop. It reorganizes — through allies, through parallel financial systems, through personal relationships that operate outside institutional channels — and continues doing what it was doing before the oversight existed. The Crypto AG operation continued for 48 years through ownership rather than alliance. The Safari Club operated for roughly six years through alliance rather than ownership. Both achieved the same objective: covert operations conducted at scale, with the knowledge of senior officials, beyond the reach of the democratic processes that were supposed to control them.

    We cover the Safari Club alongside Marc Rich’s sanctions arbitrage, Operation Gladio’s stay-behind armies, and 21 other case studies of invisible institutional power across our Shadowcraft course — where the question isn’t whether governments conduct operations beyond democratic oversight but how the infrastructure for doing so gets built, funded, and maintained across decades.

  • Desalination in 2026: The Technology, the Cost Curve, and the Gulf States Betting Their Future On It

    Ninety percent of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from desalination. In Oman, it’s 86 percent. In Saudi Arabia, 70 percent. The Gulf Cooperation Council countries account for roughly 60 percent of global desalination capacity, producing 40 percent of the world’s desalinated water from over 400 plants. These countries didn’t adopt desalination because it was cheap or elegant. They adopted it because the alternative was having no water. The global desalination market was valued at $20.3 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $44.6 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate above 9 percent — driven by the same forces that made the Gulf states dependent on it: climate change, population growth, groundwater depletion, and the slow-motion realization that the planet’s freshwater supply was never distributed in a way that matches where humans decided to build cities.

    How it works and what it costs

    Two technologies dominate. Thermal desalination — primarily multi-stage flash distillation — heats seawater, evaporates it, and condenses the steam into freshwater. It’s the older method, consumes 5 to 12 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter, and remains prevalent in the Gulf because waste heat from co-located power plants can offset the energy cost. Reverse osmosis pushes seawater through semi-permeable membranes at high pressure, allowing water molecules through while blocking salt. RO consumes 2 to 4 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter — roughly half the energy of thermal methods — and has become the dominant technology globally because of that efficiency advantage.

    The cost trajectory has been dramatic. Twenty years ago, desalinated water cost roughly $1 per cubic meter. Over the last two decades, advances in membrane materials, energy recovery devices, and plant design have reduced that by approximately 80 percent. Recent bids in Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have come in below $0.50 per cubic meter for the first time. The Taweelah plant in the UAE — operational since 2022 with a capacity of 909,200 cubic meters per day — reportedly achieves costs as low as $0.49 per cubic meter. Israel’s Sorek II plant, producing 670,000 cubic meters daily, set a new record-low desalination water price when it was contracted. For context, the average American household uses roughly 1.1 cubic meters of water per day. At $0.50 per cubic meter, desalinated water costs the plant operator about 55 cents to produce a household’s daily supply. That’s not free, but it’s no longer prohibitive.

    The world’s largest desalination plant — Ras Al-Khair in Saudi Arabia, commissioned in 2014 — produces nearly 3 million cubic meters per day using a hybrid of thermal and RO technology, at a construction cost of approximately $7.2 billion. Saudi Arabia is planning to more than double its capacity: the Shuaiba 3 expansion (600,000 cubic meters per day, $821 million, powered partly by captive solar PV) entered commercial operation in 2025. The Rabigh 3 project adds another 600,000 cubic meters per day. NEOM — the $500 billion planned city — contracted a 500,000-cubic-meter-per-day RO facility with Veolia and Itochu, designed to run entirely on renewable energy and meet 30 percent of the city’s anticipated water demand.

    What’s advancing

    The next-generation improvements target the three constraints that limit current RO: energy consumption, membrane fouling, and brine disposal. Energy recovery devices now capture up to 70 percent of the hydraulic energy from the high-pressure brine stream that would otherwise be wasted, feeding it back into the system. Modern pressure exchangers have cut the net energy cost of RO plants significantly, pushing some facilities toward the thermodynamic minimum of roughly 1 kilowatt-hour per cubic meter.

    Membrane materials are where the research intensity is highest. Graphene oxide membranes — exploiting graphene’s two-dimensional nanochannels for faster water transport with higher salt rejection — have demonstrated permeability improvements over conventional polyamide membranes in laboratory settings. Aquaporin-based biomimetic membranes, which mimic the protein channels that biological cells use to transport water, represent an even more radical approach. Both remain pre-commercial at scale. The gap between laboratory performance and industrial deployment in desalination membranes is measured in years to decades, not months — each new material must demonstrate durability, fouling resistance, and consistent performance across millions of cubic meters before operators will trust it in a plant that supplies a city’s drinking water.

    Solar-powered desalination is the integration that could change the economics fundamentally, particularly in equatorial regions where solar irradiance is high and freshwater is scarce. Photovoltaic-powered RO systems have demonstrated specific energy consumption as low as 0.3 to 0.36 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter — an order of magnitude below conventional thermal methods. The NEOM plant is the highest-profile test of this approach at scale. Solar thermal desalination — using concentrated sunlight to directly evaporate seawater — is simpler and potentially cheaper for small-scale applications, but achieves lower throughput and is further from industrial deployment.

    What doesn’t work yet

    The brine problem is the constraint nobody has solved at scale. For every liter of freshwater a desalination plant produces, it generates roughly 1.5 liters of concentrated brine that is 1.5 to 2 times saltier than the intake seawater. The standard disposal method is pumping it back into the ocean through diffuser systems. The environmental impact is real: the Gulf’s waters are now estimated to be 25 percent saltier than typical seawater, in part because of decades of concentrated brine discharge from hundreds of desalination plants in a semi-enclosed body of water. Marine organisms in discharge zones show stress responses. The long-term ecological consequences of turning the Gulf into an increasingly hypersaline environment are poorly understood because nobody studied the baseline before the plants were built.

    The energy dependency is the strategic vulnerability. Desalination is energy-intensive regardless of technology. Countries that rely on desalination for most of their drinking water are converting an energy problem into a water problem — or, more precisely, coupling the two so that a disruption to energy supply becomes a disruption to water supply. The Gulf states’ pivot toward solar-powered desalination is partly an efficiency play and partly a hedging strategy: if oil revenues decline or fossil fuel supplies are disrupted, the water infrastructure needs an energy source that doesn’t depend on the same commodity the region exports.

    Forward osmosis, membrane distillation, electrodialysis, and various hybrid configurations are in active development — each targeting specific niches where conventional RO is suboptimal (brackish water, high-salinity environments, waste heat recovery). None has displaced RO as the dominant technology, and the pattern in desalination innovation is consistent: new approaches demonstrate promising laboratory results, face years of scale-up challenges, and either find a niche application or fail to compete with incrementally improving RO. The technology isn’t waiting for a breakthrough. It’s improving through accumulation — better membranes, better energy recovery, better pretreatment, better plant design — each shaving fractions of a kilowatt-hour or fractions of a cent off the cost per cubic meter.

    The honest constraint

    Desalination can produce unlimited freshwater from the ocean. That sentence is technically true and practically misleading. It can produce freshwater at a cost — in energy, in capital, in environmental impact, in operational complexity — that is falling but not zero, and that scales with the volume of water a society needs. Israel, which now gets roughly 80 percent of its domestic water from desalination, is the proof of concept: a technologically advanced country with high per-capita income that invested systematically in desalination infrastructure over 20 years and fundamentally solved its water scarcity problem. Whether that model is replicable in countries with lower per-capita income, weaker institutions, and higher water demand — India, Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa — is the question that determines whether desalination solves the global water crisis or remains the solution for countries rich enough to afford it.

    We cover desalination alongside fusion energy, solid-state batteries, asteroid mining, and 20 other technologies racing to cross the gap between “works in principle” and “works on a Tuesday” across our Technology Moonshots course — where “done” means boring, measurable, and operable at scale, and desalination is the moonshot closest to actually being done.

  • NEOM and The Line: Saudi Arabia’s $500 Billion Bet on Building a City From Scratch

    In July 2022, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman released a promotional video for The Line—a planned linear city stretching 170 kilometers across the Saudi desert, 500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, clad entirely in mirrored glass, housing nine million people, with no cars, no streets, no carbon emissions, and every daily necessity within a five-minute walk. The video was produced with the aesthetic confidence of a prestige television trailer and the engineering specificity of a fever dream. There would be flying taxis. Robot butlers. A sports stadium suspended 350 meters in the air. Vertical farms. Artificial intelligence managing the entire city like a cognitive organism. The prince called it “a civilizational revolution” and said it would be the most livable city on the planet “by far.”

    Three and a half years later, construction on The Line is suspended.

    The Saudi sovereign wealth fund paused work on September 16, 2025. The NEOM CEO quit. The 2029 Asian Winter Games, which were supposed to be held at Trojena—a ski resort built on manufactured snow in the Saudi mountains, another NEOM subproject—were indefinitely postponed in January 2026. The workforce has been cut by roughly 35 percent. Over a thousand employees have been relocated from the remote construction site to Riyadh. The sovereign wealth fund wrote down $8 billion from the project. Internal evaluations suggest the final cost of The Line alone could approach $9 trillion—not billion, trillion—which is roughly nine times Saudi Arabia’s annual GDP. And the Financial Times reported that MBS himself has now privately accepted that the original vision will be realized as something “far smaller.”

    This is, by any objective measure, one of the most spectacular collisions between architectural ambition and physical reality in modern history. And the thing is, it was always going to end up here. The warning signs weren’t subtle. They were load-bearing.

    What was actually proposed

    The original specifications for The Line read like someone took a megastructure from a science fiction novel and submitted it as an engineering brief without checking whether the laws of physics had signed off. Two parallel mirrored walls, each 500 meters tall—roughly the height of One World Trade Center—extending 170 kilometers in a straight line from the Red Sea coast inland through desert valleys and over mountain terrain, with a 200-meter-wide gap between them containing a multi-layered city stacked vertically: residential, commercial, recreational, and transportation layers, all climate-controlled, all connected by automated transit, all powered by renewable energy.

    The planned population density was 260,000 people per square kilometer. For comparison, Manila—the most densely populated city on Earth—has a density of roughly 44,000 per square kilometer. The Line, as designed, would be six times denser than the densest city that currently exists. And it would achieve this density not by building outward, as every city in human history has done, but by building upward and linearly, which creates engineering constraints that compound at every scale: structural loading, wind forces on a 500-meter-tall continuous surface, seismic risk in a region with active fault lines, thermal management in a desert where surface temperatures regularly exceed 50°C, water supply for nine million people in one of the driest regions on Earth, and the logistical challenge of moving millions of tons of construction material to a remote site with no existing infrastructure.

    The cost estimate of $500 billion was, in retrospect, the most optimistic number in the history of optimistic numbers. An engineering analysis by Imperial College London noted that constructing The Line to its stated specifications within the proposed timeline would require building at 15,000 times the rate of normal U.K. construction. The volume of The Line’s enclosed space—roughly 17 billion cubic meters—at standard high-rise construction costs of about $1,000 per cubic meter implies a structural cost alone of $17 trillion. You don’t have to be a construction engineer to sense that the math wasn’t done before the video was shot.

    What was actually built

    The construction that did happen is not nothing—and this is the part that gets lost in the “it’s all a fantasy” narrative. Satellite imagery from late 2024 shows massive earthworks, completed buildings, grid-like infrastructure layouts, and support facilities along the western end of the route near the coast. The 170-kilometer trench that was excavated across the desert is visible from space. Concrete foundations have been poured. Vertical cores—the structural columns that will support the mirrored walls—have been started along the initial 2.4-kilometer “Phase One” section.

    Phase One was always going to be the proof of concept: a small section near the Red Sea containing anchor assets—residential units, commercial space, a marina, and the foundations for the stadium—designed to demonstrate the concept and attract further investment. The work on that section is real, it’s substantial, and it represents an enormous expenditure of capital, labor, and engineering effort.

    But Phase One is 2.4 kilometers out of 170. That’s 1.4 percent of the total length. And even that section isn’t complete. The cores are partially built. The steelwork for the outrigger beams hasn’t been installed. The mirrored cladding—the visual signature of the entire project—exists only in renders. The timeline for completing even this initial section is unclear, because construction was suspended in September 2025 and as of March 2026, work has not resumed.

    Why it stalled

    The proximate cause is money. Oil prices have been softer than Saudi Arabia’s budget requires, the sovereign wealth fund’s portfolio has underperformed, and the combined cost of Vision 2030’s megaprojects—of which NEOM is only one—has exceeded the kingdom’s ability to fund them simultaneously. When you’re also building the world’s tallest skyscraper in Jeddah, a massive entertainment city called Qiddiya with a Six Flags theme park, and dozens of other giga-scale developments, something has to give. The Line, being the most expensive and most speculative of the bunch, was the logical candidate for a strategic pause.

    But the deeper cause is that the project was, from inception, designed backward. The vision came first. The engineering came second. The constraints came last—or, more accurately, never fully arrived. This is the pattern that every failed megaproject follows, from Fordlandia to the Concorde to the Superconducting Super Collider: you start with an inspiring image of the finished product, work backward to figure out how to build it, discover that the physics or the economics or both don’t cooperate, and spend years trying to close the gap between what you announced and what you can deliver before quietly scaling back and declaring the scaled-back version was the plan all along.

    The specific engineering problems with The Line have been catalogued exhaustively by independent analysts. Pouring concrete at scale in a remote desert environment requires perfect consistency over long durations—too fast and the ingredients separate, too slow and it sets unevenly. The mirrored glass exterior would create a solar death ray effect, concentrating reflected sunlight onto the ground between the walls at temperatures that could melt asphalt. The structural loads on a 500-meter-tall continuous wall extending for 170 kilometers—including wind loading, thermal expansion, and seismic forces—exceed anything that’s been built anywhere on Earth. The water supply for nine million people in the Tabuk desert would require the largest desalination infrastructure ever constructed, in a location with no existing water infrastructure. Each of these problems is solvable in isolation. Together, at this scale, in this timeline, in this location, they compose something approaching impossibility.

    What happens now

    According to the most recent reporting, architects have been tasked with figuring out how to repurpose the infrastructure that’s already been built—the trench, the foundations, the cores—into something deliverable. The leading candidates appear to be a much shorter initial city section near the coast (the 2.4-kilometer Phase One, potentially extended to 5 kilometers) at a reduced height, with the remaining earthworks potentially repurposed for industrial use, including AI data centers. The coastal location is considered an asset—saltwater for cooling, proximity to shipping lanes, existing port infrastructure from the Oxagon industrial zone nearby.

    The full 170-kilometer vision has been deferred to a “multi-decade timeline,” with 2045 cited as a possible completion date—though at current pace, independent analysts have projected full realization could stretch into the 2070s or 2080s, if it happens at all. The Mukaab, a massive cuboid building planned for another Vision 2030 project in Riyadh, has already been cancelled outright. Trojena’s Asian Winter Games have been indefinitely postponed. The broader NEOM ecosystem is being triaged: some components (Oxagon, the industrial port) appear viable; others (Trojena, Sindalah luxury island) are in critical condition.

    What it actually tells us

    The Line is not a story about Saudi Arabia being uniquely delusional. It’s a story about what happens when a planned city is designed as a marketing asset rather than an engineering project—when the render is more important than the spec sheet, when the announcement timeline drives the construction timeline rather than the other way around, and when the person commissioning the project has the authority to override every engineer in the room who’s trying to explain why the physics don’t work.

    The historical record on planned cities built from scratch is not encouraging even under far less ambitious parameters. Brasília works but is widely considered sterile. Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s purpose-built capital, is a ghost town. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, billed as the world’s first zero-carbon city in 2006, has been quietly scaled back to a small neighborhood. Songdo in South Korea, designed as a ubiquitous computing city, is roughly half-occupied a decade after opening. The pattern is consistent: planned cities that succeed tend to be modest in scope and flexible in design. Planned cities that lead with a grand vision and a promotional video tend to become very expensive lessons in the difference between rendering and reality.

    The Line may still produce something useful. A 2.4-kilometer coastal development with advanced infrastructure and renewable energy systems would be a significant achievement, even if it bears almost no resemblance to the mirrored canyon city in the original video. But that’s the downgrade that reality imposes on ambition when the constraints weren’t named before the plan was drawn, and it’s a pattern as old as city-building itself.

    We cover NEOM, The Line, and the full history of utopian megaprojects—from Fordlandia to Auroville to the kibbutz movement—across our Utopian Societies course. The pattern of visionary ambition meeting structural reality is the through-line of the entire course, and The Line is its most expensive modern example.