Michael Field Author & Editor

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.