Prince Turki AlFaisal Al Saud is the youngest son of King Faisal,
who ruled Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975. He was educated at
Princeton and Georgetown University. From 1978 to 2001 he was head
of the Saudi Arabian General Intelligence Department, which was
responsible for the Kingdom's dealings with Afghanistan, and for
the next twenty-three years it was Afghanistan that absorbed most
of his attention. Soon after he left the Department, he was
appointed Ambassador to London from 2003 to 2005, and then
Washington from 2005 to 2007. In these posts he argued first
against the invasion of Iraq, and once that was a fait accompli,
for a more sensitive, less radical political solution than that
imposed by the Americans. Since he left Washington Prince Turki has
been running the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic
Studies in Riyadh.
Michael Field read history at Cambridge. He travelled to the Middle
East in his long vacations, became a journalist rather by accident
and has been working on the Middle East ever since. In the 1970s
and 1980s he worked for the Financial Times, and wrote several
books, the best known being The Merchants, the story of some of the
big Arabian business families. In the 1990s he left journalism and
worked as a consultant to companies dealing with the Middle East,
and from this evolved his main current business which is a series
of ruling family trees and government charts covering Saudi Arabia
and the Gulf states.
"...a valuable addition to the historical literature of the
Afghan-Soviet War and its aftermath."-- "Strategic Studies
Quarterly"
"...elegantly written and an important glimpse into a crucial
period in modern history."-- "New Lines Magazine"
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