At a time when understanding our friends is as important as understanding our enemies, Prince Bandar bin Sultan remains one America’s most enigmatic powerbrokers. As the illegitimate son of a Saudi prince and a servant girl, Prince Bandar overcame his unrecognized beginnings to rise as one of Saudi Arabia’s brightest diplomatic stars, ultimately becoming the Ambassador to the United States—and one of the most influential men in Washington.

As Ambassador, Prince Bandar worked with CIA Director Bill Casey to fund covert CIA operations with Saudi petrodollars. He played a key role in the Iran–Contra affair; consulted with President Gorbachev to secure Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; negotiated an end to the Iran-Iraq war; and, with Nelson Mandela, resolved the Pan Am Flight 103/Lockerbie Affair. He served under four different American presidencies and was called “Washington’s indispensible operator” by the New Yorker.

Yet Prince Bandar was more than this. His entre into Washington society and the Oval Office was unmatched. George H.W. Bush took the Prince and his family on fishing vacations; First Lady Reagan used him to convey messages to her husband’s Cabinet; Colin Powell would drop by his house to play racquetball. During the first Gulf War, Prince Bandar even became a de facto member of the National Security Council.

In this biography, RAF college friend and fellow pilot William Simpson pulls back the curtain for the first time on the fascinating and startling life of the man who emerged throughout the 1980s and ’90s as the most powerful and influential ambassador to the United States since World War II. Simpson sheds new light on his as-of-yet understated role in the Iran-Contra affair, his meteroic rise to power, his contributions to world peace, and recent controversies such as the Prince’s role in discreetly repatriating Saudi students and bin Laden family members during the complete domestic flight ban directly after 9/11. Simpson investigates the entanglement of the House of Saud with the bin Laden family, which spawned the notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden, well as the Prince’s controversial relationships with the movers and shakers of American policy.

With a preface by Nelson Mandela and a foreword by Margaret Thatcher, this biography of Prince Bandar is sure to become the definitive work on the engimatic Prince behind the White House.