Sleeping With The Devil (17 page)

    My Alawite officer friend swore that Asad hadn’t checked the
lieutenant’s file before he called. As a young officer, he said, Asad had made it a habit to
know all of his fellow Alawite officers by name, clan, and family, and those same officers
carried him to power in 1970. When Asad rose to a position that gave him access to military
personnel files, he read them all, including the Sunnis’ and Christians’. Asad had a remarkable
memory for detail. He could tell you all about an officer’s training record, evaluations, and
assignments. Knowing his officer corps inside and out was what kept Asad in power for thirty
years, until he died in his bed on June 10, 2000. As we used to say in the CIA, Asad had
“coup-proofed” Syria.

    Needless to say, the system didn’t make the Alawites popular,
especially with Syria’s Sunni majority. To make matters worse, the Sunnis questioned whether
the Alawites were even real Muslims. Not much is known about Alawite beliefs; they have no
canon. Alawite elders transmit their tenets orally from one generation to the next, but since
an elder is usually in his wheelchair by the time he receives the truth, he’s not inclined to
chat about it. The little that is certain is Alawites believe in a sort of trinity - heresy to
orthodox Muslims, who hold that Allah’s power is indivisible. The Alawites’ enemies also accuse
them of many other ugly heresies, from drinking wine in the mosque to being a lost tribe of
Israel.

    Still worse, Asad was minister of defense when Syria and the rest of
the Arab world were humiliated in the Six Days War of 1967. Syria’s Sunni Muslims blamed Asad
personally, alleging that if he had been Sunni, a true believer, he never would have let such a
colossal defeat happen. As long as Asad was alive, he had this stinging accusation ringing in
his ears. He knew that if he ever made a single concession to Israel - anything short of
getting back all the land he lost during that war - the growing ranks of Islamic fanatics would
accuse him of betrayal and, worse, apostasy. Asad knew early on what the West is beginning to
sense: that the wave of Islam was going to be one hell of a ride.

    Not surprisingly, Syrian Sunnis despise the Alawites and dream in the
darkness of night about one day overthrowing them. Syria’s Islamic fanatics, the Muslim
Brotherhood, actually tried. In 1973, when Asad dropped a clause in the Syrian constitution
that the president had to be a Muslim, Muslim Brother-inspired riots broke out all over the
country. Asad was forced to restore the clause, but the damage was done. The Muslim Brothers
started assassinating Alawites and even targeted their “Christian” allies, the Soviet military
advisers who helped keep Syria a thorn in the West’s side. On June 16, 1979, the Muslim
Brothers attacked an artillery school in Aleppo, picking out Alawite cadets for execution. In
1980, in sympathy with the Iranian revolution, Syrians took to the streets again, demanding an
Islamic state - one not headed by infidel Alawites.

    Sitting at my desk in South India, the more I read, the more curious I
grew about the Muslim Brothers. Back then I knew almost nothing about Islam, but from what I’d
seen in Madras and elsewhere on the subcontinent, Muslims were relatively tame. Sure, they
might riot and burn Hindu shops, but the outbursts rarely lasted over a day or two, and the
discontent never turned into terrorism. India’s Muslims weren’t assassinating politicians or
setting off car bombs, like the Brothers.

    I asked headquarters for a backgrounder on the Muslim Brotherhood and
got back a one-page regurgitation of what was already public. At least it was a decent primer
on the group’s history. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian, Hassan
al-Banna, to purify Islam and rid Egypt of foreign influence. In 1947 it turned to violence,
attacking Jewish-owned businesses in Cairo. A year later, the government banned the Muslim
Brotherhood. “When words are buried, hands make their move,” al-Banna was widely quoted as
saying when he heard the news. On December 28, 1948, the Brothers made good on al-Banna’s
prophecy by assassinating the Egyptian prime minister. The government responded by cutting off
the snake’s head, killing al-Banna in 1949, but that only made the Brothers more fanatical.
After al-Banna’s successors made an attempt on Egyptian president Nasser’s life in 1954, Nasser
shut down the Muslim Brotherhood altogether, driving it underground and into exile.

    Most of the Brothers ended up in Saudi Arabia, but not all. Some fled
to Syria, where students returning from Egypt in the 1930s had founded a branch. Eventually,
the Syrian government would grind that under its heel and send the Brothers scurrying again,
most to the Saudis but some to West Germany (where they would establish the cells that set the
stage for September 11). Others remained in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria, driven underground
but not out of existence.

    That was the extent of the available information. Based on
headquarters’ messages, I gathered that the CIA knew next to nothing about the Muslim
Brotherhood. My assumption was that it didn’t have a source, a spy, a plant, anything, anywhere
in the organization. The agency clearly had no idea how the Syrian Brothers were organized or
where they were getting their money, and frankly, I was surprised.

    Even from remote India, I could tell the Brotherhood was spreading like
a virus. Branches had popped up in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere, but Syria
seemed to be the real problem. It could make or break a peace settlement with Israel.
Officially, Washington wanted Asad gone - he was armed by the Soviet Union and sided with them
in almost every international dispute - but if he were replaced by the Brothers, you could
count on things getting a lot worse. If history was any guide, the Brothers weren’t going to
sit around Asad’s palace smoking his Havana-leaf cigars; they would be at the front, leading an
attack on Israel. How could the CIA not know whether the Brothers had any chance of taking over
Syria? Not having a spy in the Brotherhood was as unthinkable as the pope not having a spy next
to Martin Luther.

    Then again, I’d been with the CIA only a couple of years and didn’t yet
understand the way things worked.

    THAT NIGHT IN AMMAN I kicked back at the Intercontinental Hotel bar
with a beer, confident I would succeed where my colleagues had failed. Once in Damascus, I
would convince Major ‘Ali to tell me all about the Brothers. He’d give me the hard facts, the
ones that headquarters didn’t have. ‘Ali might be an Alawite, but I figured that since his life
was on the line, he would have made it his business to know about the enemy. (Did I mention I
was young and naive?) Of course, I would have preferred to get the facts from a real, live
Syrian Muslim Brother, but that seemed a long shot, since I had no idea where to find one.

    The next morning before heading off for Damascus, I went to see Amman’s
chief, Tom Twetten. I had known Tom from when he was deputy in Delhi and I was in Madras. Slim
and prematurely gray, Tom was friendly and competent. I suspected even then that he was on his
way up, and he did go on to become the CIA’s deputy director of operations. At the end of Tom’s
career, in one of those ironic twists of fate, his son-in-law was murdered when Pan Am 103 blew
up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

    Tom and I talked mostly about the mechanics of getting me into Syria.
Headquarters had routed me though Amman in order to bypass the Damascus airport, which was
closely watched by Syrian intelligence. If I took a taxi from Amman to Damascus, I could slip
in and out of the country before the Syrians noticed, or so the plan went.

    When we finished, I asked Tom about the Syrian Muslim Brothers.

    He shrugged. “The Jordanians give them money and refuge, but only
because they hate the Syrians - ‘my enemies’ enemy is my friend’ sort of deal.”

    “What do the Jordanians say about them?” I asked.

    “We don’t press the Jordanians for details. And they don’t volunteer
anything. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a target for us.”

    What Twetten was telling me was that he had no instructions to spy on
the Muslim Brotherhood. CIA posts overseas are only supposed to spy on countries or terrorist
groups that headquarters tell them to spy on. I can’t tell you for sure, but the Soviet Union
must have been Amman’s number one priority, with China maybe a distant second. In practical
terms, it meant that almost every case officer working for Twetten spent his days and nights
chasing Soviet diplomats, hoping one might agree to spy for the CIA. In his spare time, an
Amman case officer might take a Chinese diplomat out for lunch, but only if he couldn’t find a
Soviet. Since the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t a target, Amman wasn’t supposed to waste time or
money on them, not even a quarter for a couple of falafel sandwiches.

    Twetten also had the problem of the CIA’s white-as-rice culture. Back
then - and this wouldn’t change much, right up until I left the CIA in December 1997 - most
case officers were middle-aged, Caucasian Protestant males with liberal-arts degrees. If they
had any experience, it was in the military. Few spoke Arabic, and the ones who did spoke it
badly. (Spending all your time with Russian-speaking diplomats didn’t do anything for your
Arabic.) Since most Brothers spoke little English, a nearly insurmountable cultural and
language barrier existed between the CIA and the Brothers. Even if Twetten had any incentive to
go after the Brothers, the chances of one of his officers ever running into one, let alone
being able to talk with him, let alone recruiting him, were close to zero.

    Amman was the model for the rest of the Middle East. The Muslim
Brotherhood - and radical Sunni Islam in general - was off the CIA’s radar scope. Maybe a
handful of analysts back at headquarters followed it in their spare time, but with no input
from the directorate of operations and no spies in the Brotherhood, they had to draw on open
sources, mostly journalists and academics, and they weren’t doing so well themselves.

    Ever since Nasser shut down the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954, finding a
Brother to interview - a militant one, at least - had been nearly impossible. They’d buried
themselves too deeply underground, and Saudi Arabia, which became the Brotherhood’s patron
after 1954, was a book as closed as the Brothers. Academics and journalists were rarely granted
visas to the kingdom. The few who were couldn’t get close to the Muslim Brotherhood offices,
mosques, divinity schools, and
madrasahs
. In other words, militant Islam was a deep
black hole. When Osama bin Laden emerged publicly in the late 1990s, for most Americans, he
might as well have popped up out of hell.

    In fairness, it wasn’t all the CIA’s fault. Until September 11, there
wasn’t a president who cared whether Langley spied on the Brothers. During the cold war,
presidents lost sleep worrying about the Soviet Union and its nukes. A third-world dictator who
ended up with a Brother’s bullet between his eyes was near the bottom of the White House’s list
of gnawing worries. Basically, the CIA existed, and always had, to spy on the Soviet Union.
Something like 60 percent or more of the CIA’s budget was dedicated to giving the president a
heads-up on whether those nukes were on the way. Every dirty war the CIA got involved in, from
the Bay of Pigs to Angola, had something to do with containing communism. Sure, a president
might have an occasional question about a place like South Africa or Japan, but as far as he
was concerned, the rest of the world was a footnote.

    That, at least, is the official explanation - which is to say, it’s the
one that official Washington wants you to believe. The real answer is infinitely more
complicated. Yes, the Soviet Union was a distraction. And yes, the Muslim Brothers were hard to
get to. But at the bottom of it all was this dirty little secret in Washington: The White House
looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against (what else?) communism. This
covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers - Allen at the CIA and John Foster
at the State Department - when they approved Saudi Arabia’s funding of Egypt’s Brothers against
Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist. He’d nationalized Egypt’s
big-business industries, including the Suez Canal. He bought his weapons from the Soviet Union.
He was threatening to bulldoze Israel into the sea. The logic of the cold war led to a clear
conclusion: If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided political
assassination was permissible, that was fine, too, so long as no one talked about it in polite
company.

    Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off
the books. There was no CIA finding, no memorandum of notification to Congress. Not a penny
came out of the Treasury to fund it. In other words, no record. All the White House had to do
was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim Brothers, like Saudi Arabia and
Jordan. That’s what happened during the Yemeni civil war that got under way in 1962. When
Nasser backed an anti-American government and sent troops to help it, Washington quietly gave
Riyadh approval to back Yemen’s Muslim Brothers against the Egyptians. As Tom Twetten said, the
enemy of my enemy is always my friend: It’s an ironclad rule in the Middle East.