[url=http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?011015fr_archive01]Royal Mess[/url] by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn The New Yorker 1994-11-28 - " ... disturbing accusations about Saudi government expenditures, detailed last summer by Muhammad Khilewi, the high-ranking Saudi defector who abandoned his U.N. post to join the opposition. Khilewi produced documents for the London Sunday Times showing payments of up to five billion dollars from the Saudi treasury for Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear weapon. Between 1985 and 1990, up to the time Saddam invaded Kuwait, installments of the generous gift to Saddam from the princes' coffers were paid on condition that some of the bombs, should the project succeed, be transferred to the Saudi arsenal. What the defector did not know was that the Fahd-Saddam nuclear project was also a closely held secret in Washington. According to a former high-ranking American diplomat, the C.I.A. was fully apprised. "I knew about it," the diplomat says matter-of-factly, "and so did they."


[b]Diplomatic Renegade[/b] by Jason D. Goldman Washington Ripple Volume IX, Issue I November 1994 - In August 1994 the US government granted political asylum to "Mohammed al-Khilewi, a dissident Saudi diplomat, [and] an expert in the field of nuclear proliferation [who] was his country's delegate to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) talks" The diplomat smuggled 13,000 documents that reportedly show that "Saudi Arabia has engaged in a secret 20-year campaign to acquire nuclear weapons. As part of its search, the oil-rich state poured billions of dollars into Saddam Hussein's drive to build a bomb even as the Iraqi dictator was planning the invasion of Kuwait... Saudi Arabia set up its own nuclear research center to study how to buy a bomb, although there is no evidence it has yet tried to build its own weapon.... Under the Iraqi-Saudi pact, Saudi Arabia would fund Iraq's nuclear weapons development program designed to turn low-grade uranium into bomb-grade material. In return, Iraq agreed to give the Saudis some of the nuclear weapons it developed."

[url]http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/saudi/index94.html[/url]