The AKI report did not specify the time period during which those attacks were plotted and prevented, but it was most probably over the past five years since al-Qaida launched a coordinated - and so far largely unsuccessful - campaign to try and destabilize the desert kingdom.

Speaking at Riyadh University Sunday, Prince Nayef said that, had a significant number of the attacks succeeded, they would have inflicted "major incalculable damage" to the country.

"I am informing you that the security services have up until now thwarted 180 terrorist attacks aimed at our country," he said. "If only the terrorists had succeeded in carrying out 30 percent of these attacks, it would have caused major incalculable damage to the country."

The AKI report also noted a report published Monday in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan saying that a series of Saudi police operations last week had captured six extreme Islamist, or jihadi, cells. In all, some 208 suspected terrorists were captured, the report said.

AKI said the terror suspects had been planning a new wave of attacks including one against a state oil complex in the eastern part of the kingdom.

The suspects were arrested over the past few months in various parts of the country, a government official said.

Saudi Arabia has been battling Islamist militants linked to al-Qaida since a wave of bombings and shootings in 2003. Nearly 300 security personnel, civilians, and militants are reported to have been killed in the past four years.

Prince Nayef's comments have so far attracted zero notice in the West, especially in the U.S. media, but they are of the greatest significance.

First, they confirm that al-Qaida and similar groups remain implacably hostile to the Saudi government. Far from seeking to encourage such extremists as many in the West rashly claim, the Saudis know they are in the front line of targets for them.

But the achievements of the Saudi security forces revealed by Prince Nayef are of even greater importance. For all their efforts, al-Qaida and its allies have never been able to plunge Saudi Arabia into the kind of chaos that neighboring Iraq has suffered since U.S. forces and their allies toppled Saddam Hussein there more than four and a half years ago. In Iraq, the only way the U.S. forces have been able to undermine al-Qaida is by finally working with local tribes and local authorities in central Iraq. The Iraqi government's own security forces have yet to prove they can stand independently on their own feet in dealing with such challenges. By contrast, the Saudi security forces remain efficient and formidable.

Prince Nayef's revelations confirm that the Saudis remain masters in their own house. It is very much in the U.S. national interest and that of the other major industrialized nations that they continue to do so. That is the lesson Western policymakers should take from the latest Saudi security successes.