Until the early 1980s the Saudis used fairly conventional means to buy political favors, namely hiring a long list of high-profile lobbyists and lawyers to represent their interests in Washington. Among those who helped promote the kingdom were Spiro Agnew, who after he resigned as Nixon's Vice President served as a middleman for US firms looking to invest in Saudi Arabia; Robert Gray, the superlobbyist who served as director of communications for the first Reagan/Bush campaign; and a number of retired CIA officials including Raymond Close, a former station chief in Riyadh. The Saudis' chief flack, though, was Fred Dutton, a former special assistant to JFK, who was as adept at working the media as he was Capitol Hill. Dutton threw brunches and receptions where his journalist friends--these included Katharine Graham, Benjamin Bradlee, CBS newsman Roger Mudd and columnist Joseph Kraft--mingled with government officials, especially those sympathetic to the Saudis. "The heart of Dutton's strategy is his recognition of the central role of the media in shaping foreign policy," Karen Elliott House of the Wall Street Journal, another of his press pals, wrote in 1982.

As the kingdom's cachet in the capital climbed, it cut back on its overt lobbying efforts. It still has Dutton on retainer, but the Saudis' total spending during the first half of 2000 came to just $490,000, according to records on file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That's chump change for a country with its resources, and far less than what big spenders like India, Japan, Taiwan and Mexico shelled out, and lower even than the expenditures of Ukraine, Venezuela and Angola.

The Saudis can afford to be stingy because they have other means of demonstrating their importance to the United States. One has been their backing of a broad range of covert US activities, including paying for arms for the Afghan mujahedeen and the Nicaraguan contras, and quietly supplying oil to South Africa during the apartheid period. Said Aburish, a Saudi dissident exile, has detailed lesser-known examples in his book The House of Saud. They range from a $50 million payment to Mobutu Sese Seko, the former dictator of Zaire, for his support of anti-Communist rebels in Angola, to Filipino Muslim rebels who were "kept in Jeddah hotel suites and afforded a lifestyle which made them forget the reason for their being there."

Riyadh has also purchased American weapons for nonmilitary reasons, a tactic that proved especially effective after the Gulf War, when US arms exporters went into a tailspin. Saudi Arabia has frequently bought weapons it doesn't need, and in some cases--such as the M-1 tank--the orders were big enough to keep entire production lines running. "Their purchases have less to do with self-defense than with building political support for themselves," says Gregory Gause, author of Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States. "It wins them favor with the Pentagon and industry, and with politicians who support them."

The Saudis have won friends in high places by using their enormous oil reserves as a tool of US foreign policy. During the cold war the kingdom routinely increased production so as to keep the international market price of oil low, which hurt the Soviet Union, a major energy exporter. Energy-industry and Middle East experts say the Saudis continue to regulate the cost of oil, to America's benefit. "They make sure the price doesn't fall so low that it ruins Texas, but also that it doesn't get so high that it damages the manufacturing states," according to Robert Vitalis of the University of Pennsylvania.

Given the kingdom's importance, Republican and Democratic Presidents have been careful to please the Saudis. In 1994 the Clinton Administration apologized to Riyadh after a State Department official had the audacity to state at a press conference that the United States had "serious concerns about human rights" in Saudi Arabia. At roughly the same time, according to a recent story in the New York Times, a group of US intelligence officials sought to undertake a study on internal stability in the kingdom. White House officials, knowing that the findings would likely be negative and fearful that they would leak, blocked the effort.

To win favor on Capitol Hill, where the Saudis have solid if less undisputed support, the kingdom dispenses what one former senior Congressional aide calls "largesse that is renowned" in Washington political circles. He recalls that the Saudis frequently sponsor "study trips" for staffers, usually at US resorts or pleasant overseas destinations like the Bahamas, and also throw lavish dinners at their embassy and local restaurants for government officials and revolving-door alumni. Such affairs are invariably hosted by the Saudis' popular ambassador, Prince Bandar, and attendees--at least those not in government and therefore not legally barred from accepting gifts--are given expensive mementos like gold coins, earrings and silk scarves. As this source explains, "The Saudi embassy closely tracks important people in town. They know who's in government, who's out and who's waiting to get back in. They handle things exactly as Machiavelli would have recommended."

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