Sleeping With The Devil (16 page)

    For nearly two hundred years, the Wahhabis, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, and his
descendants would wage war across the width and breath of the Arabian peninsula. In 1801 a
Wahhabi raiding party sacked Karbala, the site of the tomb of the prophet’s grandson, Husayn,
and one of Shi’a Islam’s most holy shrines. In the course of eight hours, the Wahhabis
massacred some five thousand Shi’a and destroyed Husayn’s tomb, a horror and an insult the
Shi’a have never forgiven.

    It was the Ikwhan - the brethren of Wahhabi tribesmen - who helped Ibn
Sa’ud capture the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; they battled the infidels, waged war against
polytheists, humbled the idolators, and expelled the foreign opportunists and their lackeys
until, after much back and forth, Ibn Sa’ud unified the conquests, named the vast bulk of
Arabia after himself and his family, established Wahhabism as the state religion, and set out
with his Wahhabi supporters to create an Islamic realm in the puritan tradition almost at the
very moment that the discovery and exploitation of oil were on the verge of changing
everything.

    THE THIRD LEG of the triangle - the Wahhabis and the industrial West -
has always been the wild card.

    Externally, petroleum and the wealth it generated wrenched Saudi Arabia
into the mid- and late twentieth century. The formation of OPEC in 1960 handed the House of
Sa’ud a lever by which it could begin prying itself loose from its corporate masters in
America. American politicians helped, too. For a quarter of a century after World War II, the
United States, not Saudi Arabia, held the global surplus oil balance, largely by domestically
storing vast amounts of petroleum bought abroad. By the mid-1950s, though, independent U.S. oil
producers and American coal companies had had their fill of foreign imports. After trying and
failing to stem the flow with voluntary restrictions, President Dwight Eisenhower imposed
mandatory quotas on foreign oil imports in 1959. Fourteen years later, when Richard Nixon
removed the import quotas, the U.S. had exhausted its surplus and become a net importer of oil.
It didn’t take long for the Arab world to punish America for its neglect.

    On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel, kicking off the
Yom Kippur War. Two weeks later, on October 19, OPEC announced a total embargo on oil exports
to the United States, in retaliation for American and Western support of Israel during the war.
The next day, Saudi King Faysal, whom American officials were convinced would never take part
in an embargo against the West, joined it, bowing to pressure brought by a coalition of other
Arab producers and the kingdom’s Wahhabi Muslim clergy. Suddenly, the petrodollar spigot
acquired new dimensions - you could open it up to make money, or close it off to make even
more.

    Within seven decades, Riyadh exploded from a mean compound of thirty
thousand inhabitants to a sprawling metropolitan area of over four million people. Muslim and
non-Muslim foreigners poured into the kingdom to work in the oil fields. At the same time,
Saudis made wealthy by oil poured out of the country: to American universities (some two
hundred thousand Saudis have been educated in American schools since the end of World War II),
to London and Paris and Rome to shop for luxury goods, to playgrounds in every corner of the
world.

    Overnight, a medieval society seemed to become a modern one. Always
under the surface were the House of Sa’ud’s longtime supporters, their base, their strength,
their brotherhood of warriors: the Russian arms dealer Yuri’s “crazy Vahabis.” For the
Wahhabis, modernity was the one implacable enemy. In geology, when plates of the earth’s crust
move in opposite directions, earthquakes result. The plate tectonics of societies and cultures
work the same way.

    Even Ibn Sa’ud had been unable to fully control his puritan fanatics,
especially the leaders of the Ikwhan. Some of those who wouldn’t submit to his authority Ibn
Sa’ud simply had mowed down; others he brought to Riyadh, where they were imprisoned until
there was nothing of them to remember.

    By the late 1960s, the fault lines that always existed between the
moderation necessary to get along in the larger world - diplomatically, militarily, and
economically - and the rigid puritanism demanded by the same faith had begun to pull
dangerously apart. Ibn Sa’ud was succeeded upon his death in 1953 by his free-spending son
Crown Prince Sa’ud. Other members of the royal family, along with religious leaders, wrested
authority from the crown prince by 1958 and forced his abdication in 1964 in favor of his half
brother Faysal, but the pattern of royal excess wouldn’t disappear. Nor would the Wahhabis’
insistence that Islam be purified. Ironically, it was the Israelis who showed them how.

    On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt, Syria,
and Jordan, quickly and decisively defeating all three countries. From Jordan, Israel captured
the West Bank and Jerusalem; from Syria, the Golan Heights; and from Egypt, the Sinai Desert.
It was maybe the most humiliating defeat the Arabs had ever suffered, at least since they were
forced out of Spain in 1492, just as Columbus was sailing for America. But for some Muslims, it
was much worse. They had lost Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in
Islam.

    At first Arabs reacted by pouring into the streets in outrage,
protesting mostly against the U.S. Then they realized they had been betrayed by their own
governments. All the arms they had bought over the years had done them no good. Why? Because so
much of the money that was supposed to go into defense had ended up in the pockets of corrupt
princes, politicians, and military officers. That’s an old lesson, but there was a new one to
be learned from the 1967 debacle. A much larger Arab force had been defeated by a relatively
tiny state based on religious cohesiveness: Israel. Wouldn’t the Arabs be stronger if they
reorganized according to their own belief, Islam?

    The Wahhabis, egged on by their Egyptian and Syrian fundamentalist
mentors, took the lesson to heart. See, we told you so, they started to preach in the mosques;
God conquers all. Anxious not to be conquered itself, the House of Sa’ud climbed aboard the
bandwagon even before it was fully built. Beginning in the early 1970s, the royal family and
charities administered by family members used their vast reservoirs of petrodollars to build a
network of mosques and religious schools, in the kingdom and abroad, where a fresh generation
of Muslim teenagers could be indoctrinated into the most violent and radical interpretation of
Islam: intolerance to innovation, the imposition of Allah’s law as it appears in the Qur’an,
and death to the infidels occupying the domains of Islam.

    Far from being a threat to American interests, the schools, or
madrasahs
, served them extravagantly. From the very onset of the cold war, U.S.
strategists were determined to establish Saudi Arabia and its leaders as a kind of sacred
bulwark against godless communism. Just as Saddam Hussein would later be demonized by American
propagandists, so Ibn Sa’ud and his successors were lionized as defenders of the faith,
guardians of the holy shrines, “the nearest we have to a successor of the caliphs,” one
breathless U.S. ambassador wrote of Ibn Sa’ud.

    The Wahhabis relished their role as the voice of militant Islam: stern
of demeanor, committed beyond Western understanding, willing to die for their beliefs. And the
madrasahs
were the place to recruit, a supermarket of spiritual warriors. In the 1980s
the schools were the main breeding ground for the Islamic militants called to holy war against
the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. Armed with U.S.-supplied weapons, backed with U.S. money
and logistic support, the “Arab-Afghans” drove the Red Army back to Moscow, crippled a
superpower, and arguably changed the course of history - a success by every measure of warfare
and geopolitics.

    Trouble was, an infidel was an infidel, whether he wore a red star on
his uniform and patrolled the streets of Kabul or supported the Jewish occupation of Arab soil.
Militant Saudi Islam also proved more unwieldy than the computer models at the National Defense
University and elsewhere had projected. Like kudzu, the impulse toward jihad began to wind its
way around everything. Most alarming, the use of Arab “freedom fighters” in the crusade against
communism combined Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood to create the perfect storm. No, it was
worse than that. It was like mixing nitroglycerin in a blender. But it would take decades for
America to feel the blast, and then Washington would pretend it had nothing to do with it. Even
today many of the bright boys along the Potomac can’t stop congratulating themselves on what a
great deal we made with Saudi Arabia.

    

    

    

    IT WAS THE TAIL END of dusk as the plane banked to land at the Queen
Alia airport. I could just make out Amman in the distance, sitting out there on the edge of the
Syrian Desert. Carved out of ragged limestone hills, it glowed like a garnet. It looked, well,
biblical.

    Too bad I wouldn’t get to see much of it. Early the next morning, I was
going on to Damascus to track down a Syrian major I’d met in India. Normally, the CIA wouldn’t
have risked sending me into a country like Syria to meet someone I barely knew, but he was an
Alawite, the minority sect that had ruled Syria with an iron grip for the last ten years. The
CIA knew virtually nothing about the Alawites. Clannish and closemouthed, they were as good as
impossible to recruit as sources. Few had ever defected. It was a long shot that anything would
come of the meeting, but the CIA thought it was worth the price of the ticket.

    I had my own agenda. I was starting to get interested in the Muslim
Brotherhood. Ideally, I would have asked for an assignment to Saudi Arabia, where so many of
the Brothers were coming to roost even back then; I could have learned a lot by simply poking
around. But Saudi Arabia was a closed society, shielded from the curious, and the State
Department never would have let a CIA officer loose there for fear of offending the Saudis.
Syria, I figured, wasn’t a bad second choice. The Alawites, after all, seemed to have figured
out how to deal with the Brotherhood, or at least keep it at bay. Learning how they did it was
sure to tell me something, and my Syrian-officer connection seemed like a promising guide. I
will call him ‘Ali.

    Before leaving India, I’d read everything I could about the Alawites.
The majority of Syrians were Sunni Muslims, about 74 percent; the Alawites represented only 11
percent of the population. Nonetheless, the Alawites held every position that had anything to
do with power. Hafiz al-Asad, the president, was an Alawite. So were the key army and air force
generals. Every important job in Syria’s half-dozen intelligence services was held by an
Alawite. But more than anything, it was the handpicked midlevel Alawite army officers who
prevented some Sunni colonel from attempting a coup.

    Let’s say a Sunni colonel needed to move one of his tanks across
Damascus, maybe for repairs. He couldn’t load it on a transport and send it off, as colonels in
most armies around the world could. Before he could even pull the transport out of its shed,
the colonel had to get the permission of the senior Alawite in his regiment. It didn’t matter
that the Alawite might be only a major or captain, or that his position had nothing to do with
repairing tanks. The point was that Asad trusted the junior officer - the Alawite - and not the
Sunni colonel. Answering to a subordinate didn’t do much for the colonel’s morale, but Asad
went to bed at night relatively sure that the colonel wouldn’t be tempted to detour his tank to
the president’s front door and knock it down with a 125-mm armor-piercing round. Alawite
officers were something like political commissars in the old Soviet Red army.

    Years later, a former Alawite officer would tell me a story to
illustrate how finely tuned the system was. Late one night a second lieutenant commanding a
forward position on the Golan Heights was surprised to hear his military landline ring. It was
a little past four, and the front was quiet; there was no conceivable reason for headquarters
to be calling. The lieutenant’s curiosity turned to suspicion when the caller asked for his
name. He demanded the caller identify himself. When he understood it was Asad on the line, the
lieutenant almost knocked over the telephone leaping to attention. His initial thought was that
he had unknowingly committed some hideous act of
lèse-majesté
and was about to lose his
head. He calmed down as Asad asked a few questions about the front, but his astonishment rushed
back when Asad asked after his two children - by name. Assured they were well, Syria’s head of
state said good-bye and hung up.