The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses
Burdick decided to speak out after learning that Hala had died in 2021, in her mid-forties, after years of malnutrition complicated by substance abuse. Her sister Maha died six months later, according to several authoritative sources. Though Burdick knew the risks involved in criticizing the Saudi regime—“note the fate of Jamal Kashoggi,” he wrote me in an e-mail—he insisted that he was unafraid. “I’m old, and I’m going to die one of these days, and I want to die with some satisfaction that I’ve done my best,” he said.
In 1995, Burdick was working as an emergency doctor in McAllen, Texas, when he noticed an unusual job advertisement in a medical journal. The opening was for a position teaching young Saudi doctors at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh, where the royal family were treated. Burdick was in his mid-fifties and burned out from decades of city hospital work—“lots of drugs, lots of alcohol, lots of violence,” he said. He found the prospect of a radical change enticing.
Burdick applied for the job and was invited to do a monthlong trial in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s health-care system was developing rapidly amid an oil rush, with state-of-the-art hospitals and research centers opening across the country—but Saudi doctors were still vastly outnumbered by foreign ones, and Burdick’s recruitment was part of a drive to train new local physicians. Awed by the plentiful resources on offer at the King Faisal Hospital, and the futuristic whirl of downtown Riyadh, he accepted the job.
Before the move, Burdick and his wife, Susan, were asked to undergo routine medical checks, and hers revealed something alarming: she had advanced cervical cancer. Burdick feared that his job offer would be withdrawn, but, instead, Saudi officials flew Susan to Riyadh, checked her into the royal hospital, and brought in a renowned Danish surgeon to perform a hysterectomy. “It was extraordinary care,” Burdick said. “I felt a real debt to the Saudis.”
Soon after Burdick started work, King Fahd, the country’s ruler at the time, had a stroke, and Abdullah, the crown prince, took over. Abdullah was a heavyset smoker in his early seventies who had already suffered a heart attack, and Burdick was among the most experienced emergency doctors in the country. He was reassigned to the palace, and charged with setting up a twenty-four-hour medical operation for the crown prince. “His staff made it clear to me that money was no object,” Burdick wrote. “Whatever I wanted or needed they would fund.”
Burdick began by inspecting each of Abdullah’s palaces in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, in addition to the residences of his multiple wives, the royal yacht, and the private jet, in order to devise a plan to deliver care within fifteen seconds of any crisis. He assembled a full staff—paramedics, nurses, doctors, technicians, drivers—and ordered that Abdullah be accompanied by at least one medical professional at all times. The King’s main residences were equipped with small I.C.U.s, and Burdick ordered four custom-built ambulances—specifying that they be outfitted with racing engines, to insure they could travel at high speed and over rough terrain.
The Burdicks had initially been given an apartment in a high-rise tower, but as Dwight’s stature grew, they were moved to one of the city’s most prestigious addresses. The Al Yamama compound was a palm-fringed oasis—complete with swimming pools, a Jacuzzi, and tennis courts—whose gates were guarded at all hours by armed sentries. The couple were installed in a spacious villa, surrounded by gardens planted with bougainvillea and snapdragons. They had a live-in maid and other staff to tend the garden and wash their car. “We were living on the royal gravy train,” Burdick said.
Their new neighbors, Burdick told me, were “the cream of the crop of intellectual, educated, sophisticated Middle Eastern people.” He and Susan drove into the desert for cookouts with friends. Burdick began attending a mosque, and eventually the couple converted to Islam. Susan, who had been raised Mormon, started wearing a head scarf, and Burdick observed the five daily prayers.
The conversion allowed Burdick to travel in Abdullah’s entourage to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Soon he was dining regularly at the palace with other trusted staff. By 2005, when King Fahd died and Abdullah ascended to the throne, Burdick was an integral presence. “I was allowed free movement in his quarters,” he told me. “I was frequently there for state dinners. I travelled internationally on his plane.”
Abdullah seemed a benevolent ruler—“a good man with a real progressive international focus,” Burdick thought. Sometimes regular citizens were allowed into the palace to petition him for help. “A Bedouin would come up and say, ‘My Suburban broke down and I can’t get it out of the desert,’ ” Burdick recalled. “And Abdullah would turn to his adviser and say, ‘Get him a new Suburban.’ ” Once, he recalled, a young woman told Abdullah that she wanted to be an engineer, but that no school in the kingdom would accept female engineering students. The monarch went on to establish the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the first such mixed-gender campus in Saudi Arabia.
In 2008, as Burdick was nearing seventy, his position was turned over to a younger Saudi physician whom he had helped to train. He would be given a new role as a consultant doctor, rotating between the King’s palaces as part of a team providing ad-hoc medical care to dozens of royals. This work entailed routinely flying to Jeddah to staff the royal clinic at the sprawling palace on the shore of the Red Sea. It was there that he learned about the King’s four imprisoned daughters.
When Burdick arrived in Jeddah, the princesses were confined in a single, opulent villa. It was a “gilded cage,” he said. Though they were kept under lock and key, they were occasionally allowed to go out shopping in the custody of royal guards, and they maintained intermittent contact with their mother and a small group of supporters by cell phone, e-mail, and Skype.
The King had fathered as many as thirty-five children with a multitude of wives. Hala and her sisters were born to Alanoud Al-Fayez, a Jordanian noblewoman, whom Abdullah had married when she was fifteen and he was about fifty. For a time, the princesses had enjoyed relative freedom, studying at expensive schools and travelling with their mother. “Princess Hala had yachted, skied, traveled on private jets, ate in Michelin starred restaurants, and slept in Palaces and 5 star hotels,” Burdick wrote.
Things soured when King Abdullah turned against Al-Fayez, blaming her for their failure to produce a son. Al-Fayez recounted in a filing to the U.N. that she fled to London in 2003, hoping that her adult daughters would be able to join her. Instead, they were locked up. “I was able to leave,” she wrote. “But my girls’ destiny is shattered more day by day.”
The King’s relationship with the four princesses had been strained for some time before their mother ran away. Sahar, the eldest, wrote in an e-mail to a supporter that she and her sisters, masquerading as social workers, once visited a poor suburb of Riyadh, and were appalled at the “utter misery and misfortune” they witnessed. When they confronted their father about what they had seen, he accused them of lying, telling them, “The Kingdom is rich and has no poor!”
Hala, who wanted to pursue a career as a clinical psychologist, further infuriated the King when she spoke out about human-rights abuses she had witnessed at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. She was briefly jailed over the incident, according to Al-Fayez and Burdick. Yet the sisters continued challenging their father over the rights of women and other marginalized groups. “It is our duty to fight for our people,” Sahar wrote, from inside the villa.
Hala Aldosari, a Saudi scholar and human-rights activist, told me that Abdullah’s imprisonment of the princesses was initially designed to exact revenge on their mother, and that their continued rebellions likely prolonged it. “Women from ruling families must reinforce the power of the state,” she said. “If they challenge those norms, or express any support for any critical opinion, the repression will be severe.”
During years of close confinement, the four sisters began to quarrel. Hala’s outburst with the knife was triggered by a dispute with Sahar, and Maha was suspected of starting fires in the villa they all shared. “You put rats in a cage and they fight,” Burdick’s former colleague told me. Eventually, Hala and Maha were moved into solitary confinement in smaller villas next door.
Soon afterward, Burdick received a summons to speak to Sahar, who still shared a villa with Jawaher. She explained, imperiously, that being the eldest sister entitled her to regular medical updates on Hala and Maha. Burdick said that when he refused, citing patient confidentiality, Sahar flew into a temper, banning him from her villa. After that, he never saw Sahar or Jawaher again.
He continued to send word to Hala whenever he had a rotation in Jeddah, urging her to request a medical visit if she wanted company. “I was her contact with the outside world,” he told me. Burdick knew that their conversations were far from private; he had seen the palace security center, where officials monitored feeds from cameras and microphones that covered every inch of the royal compound, with the exception of the King’s private quarters. Hala was cautious, too, he said; when she wanted to say something sensitive, she would play loud music and reduce her voice to a whisper.
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