Saudis Balk at Storing U.S. Arms : Military: The Pentagon is preparing to take back tanks and other hardware unless an agreement is reached soon.

U.S. defense officials, disappointed at the slow pace of negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the storage of American military hardware in the desert kingdom, are preparing to return the tanks and other gear to the United States unless an agreement is reached soon.

Officials traveling with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said the Saudis are balking at the creation of a large U.S. military depot there because of divisions within the Saudi royal family.

One faction, led by King Fahd, would permit the United States to store as much as a division’s worth of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other equipment if it could be done unobtrusively. The equipment, left over from the massive supplies shipped in for the Gulf War, would be stored at major Saudi military camps and at port facilities.

But the king’s half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, speaking for religious and political conservatives, opposes any permanent U.S. presence in the Muslim kingdom. The conservatives say the presence of Western infidels is a sacrilege in the home of the two holiest shrines in Islam.

The rift has slowed negotiations on a range of U.S.-sponsored talks aimed at creating a regional security umbrella to deter aggression and to protect the ruling regimes from internal threat.

Although Pentagon officials have engaged in discussions with all six Gulf Cooperation Council states about shoring up their defensive capabilities, only Kuwait has signed a formal agreement with the United States.

Cheney said Monday that the Bush Administration hopes to reach such agreements with the five other council members: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

He said the goal is to “enhance their capability to defend themselves and also our ability to return in a hurry if required.” That would entail, Cheney said, agreements on joint military exercises, basing of combat equipment, additional training for local forces and new arms sales.

Cheney refused to detail the progress made with any individual nation. “For me to get into the business of saying what specifically we’ve worked out, country by country, (would) create significant diplomatic problems,” he said.

Cheney flew to Rome on Friday at the end of a two-day meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers in Sicily. At the historic session in the town of Taormina, the ministers agreed to scrap 80% of the nuclear weapons based in Europe, leaving 700 air-delivered bombs as the sole remaining NATO nuclear deterrent on the Continent.

The Pentagon chief met with Italian President Giulio Andreotti and Defense Minister Virginio Rognoni before returing to Washington on Monday night.

Although Cheney said he was satisfied with the progress of the Persian Gulf security talks, other officials expressed frustration at the slow pace and complicated politics of the negotiations.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said U.S. military officials had sent home most of the hardware that was planned for return. They had expected to leave the rest, roughly 600 M-1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles--enough to outfit a full mechanized division--at storage sites in Saudi Arabia for use in any possible future conflict.

But Pentagon logisticians are now preparing to ship the remaining equipment out because the Saudis have not consented to permanent basing on Saudi soil. Officials here said, however, that the process could be quickly reversed if there is a change of heart in the kingdom’s leadership.

Cheney disputed recent newspaper reports that suggested that U.S.-Saudi ties are on the rocks. “Stories that imply that the relationship is in bad shape simply aren’t valid,” he said. “I think the relationship is better than it’s ever been. We have, as some Saudi officials have told me, shed blood together.”

He also took issue with an article to be published this week in the magazine Mother Jones that says that he and senior Saudi officials have reached a secret treaty committing the United States to defend Saudi Arabia against all threats and to permanently station as many as 7,000 U.S. troops in the kingdom.

“Stories that imply the U.S. is seeking a permanent presence in Saudi (Arabia) in terms of forces aren’t valid, either,” Cheney said.

He also said the United States has made no secret pledge to defend Saudi Arabia.

“It was always very public that we had an interest in Saudi Arabia,” Cheney said. “It’s not as if it’s been a secret that we were close friends of Saudi Arabia and would cooperate with them when their security was threatened. And we did.”

But he said he would not spell out all the terms of the defense arrangements with Saudi Arabia or any other Middle Eastern state. “For obvious reasons, we don’t get specific about the relationships we have . . . because of the sensitivities in the area,” he said.

Although the Pentagon clearly would like to cement its presence in the Persian Gulf while the memory of the war against Iraq is still fresh, officials are resigned to a long, painstaking process of negotiations, false starts and lowered expectations.

For his part, Cheney said he is neither surprised nor disappointed by the halting progress. Asked if he had expected to be further along in the process by now, he replied: “No, I don’t think so. Not given the way the world works.”