Behind the Kingdom's Veil: Inside the New Saudi Arabia Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
About this ebook
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most secretive countries. Now, Susanne Koelbl, award-winning journalist for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, unveils many secrets of this mysterious kingdom. For years she traveled the Middle East, and recently lived in Riyadh during the most dramatic changes since the country’s founding. She has cultivated relationships on every level of Saudi society and is equally at ease with ultra-conservative Wahhabi preachers, oppositionists, and women from all walks of life.
In this “piercingly powerful book” (Ahmed Rahid, New York Times-bestselling author of Taliban), you can have breakfast with Royal Highnesses; meet Osama bin Laden’s bomb-making trainer; enter palaces of secret service chiefs; listen to intimate conversations with women about their newly offered freedoms; learn about journalist Jamal Khashoggi; and view an in-depth portrait of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), as you learn about the not-so-obvious facts of the kingdom’s history, politics, customs, and hidden power relations.
About the author
Susanne Koelbl is an award-winning journalist and a military and foreign correspondent for the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Her stories highlight the intricate dynamics in conflict areas and wars around the world, including the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Koelbl is known for her probing reports from Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea. Her highly acclaimed book Dark Beloved Country: People and Power in Afghanistan. was published in 2009.
Always close to the people, Koelbl uses their voices to make complicated political and societal contexts accessible. For her in-depth and thorough reporting she received several industry recognitions, including the Liberty Award and the Henry-Nannen-Price award. In her exceptional interviews with state leaders, intelligence-chiefs and Islamic extremists, Koelbl repeatedly challenges the powerful, including the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (wanted for genocide with an international arrest warrant), or the underground Hamas leader Khaled Mashal. Koelbl has excellent contacts in all political camps in the Middle East.
Koelbl is a fellow of the Bertelsmann Foundation's German-Israeli Young Leaders Program, a Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and was named a Media Ambassador with the German-Chinese Exchange Program of the Bosch Foundation at Tsingua University in Beijing. As a Knight Wallace Fellow, Koelbl gave guest lectures in 2012 on the war in Syria and the forty-year Afghanistan crisis. As a Knight Wallace alumni Koelbl is connected and tied into top influential media outlets in the US.
The author has been travelling to Saudi Arabia since 2011. Most recently she lived in Riyadh during 2018-2019.
Page BreakKaren Elliott House (1947-) was born in Matador, Texas, population 900. She earned a BJ degree at UT Austin where she discovered the world of news reporting on the student newspaper. She was a reporter, foreign editor and finally publisher of The Wall Street Journal, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her reporting on the Middle East. Her first book, "On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines--and Future," published by Knopf in 2012 is a portrait of Saudi society and culture and examines the fragility of the ruling regime. The book repesents three decades of reporting in this shrouded kingdom. She currently resides in Boston, MA.
