The Kingdom & the Power.

"Hogwash!" said the Saudi foreign minister, exploding with frustration. Prince Saud al-Faisal--American-educated, urbane, customarily courteous and reserved almost to a fault--was headed back to Riyadh after a whirlwind trip trying to calm a growing storm in Washington. He'd listened to congressional accusations that his government's intelligence agencies might have had direct connections to the September 11 hijackers. He'd met with President George W. Bush and asked that 28 pages of classified "innuendo," as one of his aides described it, be released to the public--to no avail. Now NEWSWEEK was on the phone, asking if the prince's octogenarian and septuagenarian uncles--the king, the crown prince, the Defense minister and Interior minister--were decrepit and losing control of their oil-rich realm.

"Hogwash!" said the prince again. "If a regime cannot face crises as they arise, it does not have a right to exist. We can do that." But many in the Bush administration, on Capitol Hill and in the intelligence community have their doubts. For decades the Saudi- American partnership has been "the fulcrum that the global economy teeters on," as a former CIA agent, Robert Baer, puts it. But now that strategic relationship is strained in a way it has never been before. An Arab source close to the Saudi royals describes them as "extremely upset--right at the edge." As leaks from the Hill fill the air with explosive allegations like fumes in a refinery, the Saudi-American friendship looks as if it might just go up in flames.

Well, looks are often deceiving in the desert kingdom. Behind the scenes, the House of Bush and the House of Saud remain steadfast allies. And it was partly in recognition of this fact that Saudi officials, who normally back away from confrontation, last week decided to take the offensive. They know the Bush administration needs their partnership now more than ever, and they know the Bushies know it, too.

Neocons in and around the Pentagon had hoped that occupied Iraq might soon replace fractious Saudi Arabia as the guarantor of stable global oil markets. Forget it. The mounting costs of crushing Iraqi resistance, and the slow pace of reconstruction, have ended those expectations. Baghdad will be lucky to produce 3 million barrels a day any time in the near future. If the security situation gets worse, that number may not top 2 million. "As long as there is no Iraqi oil," says a European intelligence analyst who met recently with top officials in Riyadh and Washington, "you had better not mess with a 10 million- barrel-a-day producer." That is, Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh is also getting cannier about the ways of America's politicians and the media. Prince Saud asked President Bush to make public the 9/11 report's classified pages because, as one Saudi official put it, "he's smart enough to know that there is nothing in it that hasn't been leaked already." Said Saud: "If it's nonsense, then it's nonsense, and we can go on. If it has substance and there are criminals, then we can catch them quickly." What's leaked so far suggests that a Saudi businessman named Omar al-Bayoumi, who befriended two of the hijackers in San Diego, may have worked for Saudi intelligence. Al-Bayoumi has since returned to Saudi Arabia. Yet Prince Saud told NEWSWEEK that only after he'd met with the president did national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice tell ...