Saudis won’t pay gas bill

The Saudi Royal Family The Saudi kingdom is reportedly worth more than $1.4 trillion, but for years the Pentagon has been demanding $15 million from the kingdom that it owes for U.S. aid during the Saudi war in Yemen. For months, the Defense Department has evaded questions from The Intercept about whether Saudi Arabia is shirking its financial obligations.

Despite the unpaid debt, the Biden administration announced Friday that it was lifting a ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, authorizing the first shipment of air-to-ground munitions to the Gulf kingdom. The ban had been in place for three years in response to the country’s heavy civilian casualties in its campaign in Yemen, but did not apply to sales of so-called defensive weapons and military services. Those sales have totaled nearly $10 billion over the past four years.

The remaining balance dates back to an operation between March 2015 and November 2018. The Pentagon spent about $300 million on aerial refueling missions to support Saudi Arabia’s and the United Arab Emirates’ warplanes as those countries fought their war to prop up the government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was ousted by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. America also provided the Saudi military and its allies with weapons, combat training and other “logistical and intelligence support.”

A Pentagon report obtained exclusively by The Intercept reveals that Saudi Arabia has repeatedly defrauded the United States on its unpaid fuel bill. After the kingdom and the United Arab Emirates paid off much of the debt in 2021 and 2022, Saudi Arabia paid just over $950,000 on a years-old balance that, as of the end of last year, stood at $15.1 million.

According to the report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, representatives from the Defense Logistics Agency and U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military activity in the Middle East, traveled to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in March 2022 to meet with the Saudi Ministry of Finance and senior Saudi Air Force officials. “At that time, the Saudi Ministry of Finance and RSAF leadership expressed their willingness to pay the remaining fuel debt owed to DLA Energy by December 2022,” the report said. When U.S. officials met again more than a year later and raised the debt issue, Saudi officials said they were “unaware of the outstanding debt and requested additional time to investigate the matter.” As of late last year, the report said, the debt had still not been paid.

For months, The Intercept has been reaching out to the Pentagon to find out whether Saudi Arabia has paid any additional money owed. Acknowledgments show that the questions were read three times by Pentagon officials in April and May. Despite dozens of follow-up messages in recent months, the defense secretary’s office has never responded to The Intercept’s questions. At the same time, the Biden administration has been negotiating billions of dollars in arms deals with the kingdom in preparation for lifting its offensive weapons ban last week — part of a policy of rapprochement aimed at strengthening ties with Persian Gulf autocracies in the face of the Gaza war and battles with Iranian proxies, as well as limiting Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East.

“The Pentagon’s unwillingness to address the issue is troubling,” said Nancy Okail, president and CEO of the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “The amount owed — $15 million — is not the issue. What’s important is the lack of transparency and accountability. It’s symptomatic of the larger problem of opacity surrounding U.S.-Saudi arms deals and defense spending.”

Saudi Arabia, supported by the United States The war in Yemen, which subsided after a truce in 2022, has directly or indirectly killed at least 377,000 people, including thousands of civilians killed in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes. A 2022 investigation by The Washington Post and the Security Force Monitor at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that a substantial portion of the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes were carried out by aircraft developed, maintained, and sold by U.S. companies, and by pilots trained by the U.S. military. That same year, a Government Accountability Office report noted that between March 2015 and August 2021, the United Nations estimated that coalition airstrikes in Yemen killed or injured more than 18,000 civilians. The GAO also determined that the Pentagon and the State Department failed to investigate the role of U.S. military support in these losses.

“The Saudi-led coalition has launched reckless strikes that killed nearly 15,000 innocent civilians, and U.S.-origin weapons were reportedly used in a number of those strikes, including a 2018 strike on a school bus that killed 40 children,” a bipartisan group of U.S. senators—Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts; Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont; and Mike Lee, D-Utah—announced in 2022. “Between 2015 and 2020, the United States provided more than $54.2 billion in defense articles and services to the Saudi and Emirati governments, in addition to nearly $650 million in military training.”

In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident critical of the Yemen war who lived in Virginia and was a Washington Post columnist, was murdered and dismembered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known as MBS. Then-President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration never hesitated to support MBS, supplying weapons to the Saudi regime even after the international outcry over Khashoggi’s murder. During his 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Joe Biden lambasted the Saudis, promising that if elected, they would “pay the price” and that he would “make them the pariahs that they are.” Saudi Arabia’s current government has “very little redeeming social value,” Biden said.

In 2021, the Biden administration banned the sale of certain types of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, citing heavy civilian casualties in Yemen, but the new president quickly reversed course. Biden warmly welcomed MBS during their meetings in 2022 and 2023 and, since taking office, has provided the kingdom with more than $9 billion in arms deals and other security assistance.

“The Biden administration’s reversal and full support for MBS has reinforced his rehabilitation in the international community after the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” said Seth Binder of the Washington-based Middle East Democracy Center. “The result has been to elevate MBS to the status of untouchable and give a green light to his ruthless repression.”

Last Friday, when the administration announced it was dropping its ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions, it also said it would consider additional transfers “on a case-by-case basis,” according to senior administration officials.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept on the resumption of offensive arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The State Department acknowledged receiving questions from The Intercept about the reasons for the resumption of these arms transfers but did not provide further response.

“The Biden administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has been a major disappointment. Biden ran for president trying to distance himself from Trump and promised to stop giving blank checks to dictators,” said Okail of the Center for International Policy. “But over the last four years, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. They have forged a relationship — primarily through arms deals — designed to push China out and lock Saudi Arabia into the U.S. orbit for many years to come.”