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Introduction The Cold War was fought on many fronts. Sometimes it was an actual shooting war, such as the large-scale, extended military engagements in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and Afghanistan. In other dangerous episodes, such as the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Cri- sis, the great global contest for power and influence that pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its communist partners took the form of direct confrontation that carried the threat of all-out war. But the Cold War was also a struggle of ideology and economics. Most of it was fought in the shadows, by diplomats, spies, agents of influence, arms dealers, propagandists, and other civilians whose preferred weapons were money, threats, favors, blackmail, and political pressure. The details of these skir- mishes, and of the efforts of diplomats to manage them, were largely unknown to the public until secret documents were declassified decades afterward. Perhaps the least likely theater of this hidden war was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the vast, thinly populated monarchy that spans the Arabian Peninsula from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. In the mid-20th century, Saudi Arabia appeared well-insulated from the tensions of the Cold War. It was rigorously anti-communist it had no diplomatic or economic relations with the Soviet Union or any other communist nation nor did it have com- munist neighbors. Never having been occupied or colonized, it had no cad- res of resentful nationalists who might have been receptive to Soviet blandishments. The Soviet troops who had imposed Moscow’s will on pros- trate Eastern Europe after World War II were thousands of miles from the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia was firmly aligned with the United States because a group of giant American companies had an exclusive contract to develop its immense reserves of crude oil, the kingdom’s only source of the revenue it needed for development. As different as Saudi Arabia was from the United States in