Diplomatic Missionaries?

IT'S BEEN A ROUGH FEW MONTHS for the Saudi embassy in Washington. First there were the money embarrassments. On April 4, the Washington Post noted: "A federal probe has turned up $36 million in unreported withdrawals [from Riggs Bank] by Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington and his wife, including million-dollar cash withdrawals reportedly made by the embassy chauffeur." Revelations eventually forced Riggs to acknowledge years of inadequate monitoring of suspicious financial transactions by the Saudis and others, and in late May the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency hit the bank with a record $25 million fine. Strapped for cash, the Saudi embassy was unable to pay the 2,600 people on its U.S. payroll that month, according to reports in several English-language Saudi news-papers.

Less attention-grabbing but also no doubt unwelcome to the Saudis are some quiet developments on Capitol Hill. The Saudi Arabia Accountability Act--a bill introduced last November that would impose sanctions on the kingdom unless the president certifies that Riyadh is making maximum efforts to fight terrorism--continues to garner sponsors. And on May 13, two members of Congress--Senator Susan Collins and Representative Dan Burton--announced that the General Accounting Office would investigate "Saudi support for an ideology promoting violence and intolerance globally."

Coming on top of the expulsion of dozens of Saudi diplomats late last year, the GAO investigation probably means new headaches for the beleaguered Islamic Affairs Department (IAD) of the Saudi embassy. This office has two functions, one familiar, the other unusual for a foreign embassy. It provides public information on Islam--that is, on the strict Saudi variant of Islam. And it supports the Saudi effort to evangelize the United States. Lately the IAD has been getting into trouble.