In addition to his international reputation as a resourceful spymaster, MBN is a hero in his own country as the result of an incident in which he nearly lost his life six years ago. He agreed to meet Abdallah Asiri, an al-Qaida terrorist, who said he would turn himself in if he could surrender directly to the Saudi deputy minister of the interior. Asiri promised that if he could meet the minister face-to-face, he would then be able to convince his comrades—including his own brother, Ibrahim Asiri, al-Qaida’s premier bomb maker, the very man who would later build the bombs that were on the planes to Detroit and Chicago—to surrender as well. When the meeting took place on August 27, 2009, Asiri triggered a bomb, blowing himself up but only lightly wounding the prince. Hours later MBN appeared on Saudi television to tell the story to the kingdom, without getting into the details.

A few days later, Leon Panetta, then the director of central intelligence, who was visiting Riyadh, got a fuller account. After Abdallah Asiri entered his office, MBN said, the two men sat on the floor on a set of pillows. Suddenly Asiri began to shake and cry. He produced a cell phone from his robes, saying he wanted to call his family. After talking intensely on the phone with his brother, Ibrahim, he passed the phone to MBN, who opened the conversation with the traditional Arab greeting, salaam alaykum (God’s peace be with you). At that moment, Asiri blew himself into a thousand pieces. The explosives, hidden in Asiri’s rectum, blasted downward and left a crater where he had been sitting, but spared MBN.

Source: http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2015/the-prince-of-counterterrorism