Sleeping With The Devil (18 page)

    If the CIA had spied on the Brothers, that would only end up exposing
them for what they were - mass murderers who, if you gave them any thought at all, could be
counted on to turn against us one day. If Tom Twetten or any other CIA officer in the Middle
East were somehow to turn over a rock and tattle to Washington, his next job would be running
the basement candy stand at Langley, maybe on the same shift as the Berlin case officer turned
towel man who tried to recruit a Saudi diplomat.

    The CIA has requested that this section - related to foreign funding of
the Muslim Brotherhood - be deleted.

    [text omitted]In 1980 President Carter’s national security adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: America would match, dollar for dollar,
Saudi money going to the Afghan resistance of the Soviet occupation. (To give you an idea of
the money involved, in 1981 alone, Saudi Arabia kicked in $5.5 billion.) So far, so good. But
if you read the fine print, you see that the bulk of the money went to the militant Muslim
groups, including Abdul Sayyaf’s.

    Sayyaf, the head of the Ittehad-e-Islami, was a particularly dangerous
man to give money and weapons to. While a student at Islam’s oldest and best-known university,
Cairo’s al-Azhar, he was recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood. Afterward, just in case he
hadn’t completely absorbed the lesson of jihad and righteous murder, he did an apprenticeship
with the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. His bloody tracts and sermons were public, but no one in
Washington raised a yellow flag, let alone a red one, for fear of upsetting Riyadh.

    If the Saudis and Pakistanis were partial to the Afghan Muslim
Brothers, the wisdom in Washington said that was the price you had to pay if you expected them
to do the dirty work. And if the Muslim Brothers were cold-blooded murderers and crazy enough
to take on a Soviet armored column with small arms, all the better. Washington has always
prided itself in fighting wars on the cheap. If success was a high Soviet body count per
dollar, then the Muslim Brothers were a fabulous bargain.

    It occurs to me that if John Ashcroft had been attorney general back
then, I and everyone else who played a part in [text omitted] and Afghanistan would have found
ourselves on one of his al Qaeda lists. No doubt about it, we were aiding and abetting the
people who would become our archenemies. Hell, I’d probably be writing this from a cage in
Guantanamo Bay.

    I HADN’T FIGURED OUT any of this as I settled into the backseat of a
dinged yellow 1965 Plymouth taxi that was going to make it to Damascus only if Allah willed it.
All I knew was that Islam seemed like a calm sea - sunny and flat on the surface, but with all
kinds of things going on below.

    The Muslim Brothers seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. How else could
they survive in a police state like Syria? How did they infiltrate themselves and their weapons
from Jordan into Syria? And why weren’t the Jordanians - or, for that matter, the Egyptians -
telling us anything about them? The Muslim Brothers were one of those subterranean truths in
the Middle East that we find out about only when they decide to surface. Today there’s even a
name for these places where the real truths (as opposed to the convenient ones) reside: the
Arab basement.

    The moment I saw Major ‘Ali pull up in his Soviet-military UAZ jeep, I
knew the detour through Amman and the day-long taxi ride had been a waste of time. Not only did
he have two armed thugs in the backseat, but his chase car and follow car were packed with
soldiers in full battle gear. One carried a belt-fed RPD machine gun, another a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher that stuck out the window.

    The major’s Mad Max caravan accompanied us everywhere. When we pulled
up in front of Damascus’s main department store, his soldiers blocked the doors and cut off
access to the parking lot so we could browse without someone popping us. When we lunched at a
restaurant on the Barada River, they restricted the entrances, including the kitchen door.
People had to wait to get in or out until we were done. All through lunch, one of ‘Ali’s gunmen
stood directly behind him, cradling a locked-and-loaded Kalashnikov. Traveling with this
circus, I never could have gotten in and out of Syria unnoticed.

    The second day of my visit, I got around to slipping in a question
about the Muslim Brothers.

    “I don’t know,” ‘Ali answered. “They’re just crazy. The only thing they
know is killing.”

    “Are they going to win?” I asked.

    By way of an answer, ‘Ali gave me a quick tour of Damascus’s terrorist
sites. The air force headquarters, which hadn’t been completely rebuilt after the Muslim
Brotherhood car-bombed it, was ringed with cement barriers and sandbagged positions. Both ends
of the street in front of Asad’s apartment were barricaded with concrete. It was the same with
the Soviet embassy. Armored vehicles were patrolling the streets, and the police were stopping
cars and pedestrians for random checks. Damascus might as well have been a concentration camp.

    We drove next to old Damascus and a street named a Street Called
Straight. It might have been straight when it was laid out by Alexander the Great’s city
planners, but now it wound through the old city’s maze of shops, open-air spice stands, donkey
carts, hawkers, itinerant vegetable sellers, and children running in all directions. It was
late afternoon, and the place was packed with end-of-day shoppers. Some women wore head
scarves; most didn’t. You could barely hear amid the shouting. ‘Ali swept his hands over the
chaos. “Here are your Brothers.”

    When we got back to his apartment, he added, “Oh, we’ll win, all right,
but only with this.” As he spoke, he slapped the pistol at his side.

    I left Damascus the following day without ‘Ali ever telling me anything
about the Muslim Brotherhood. He also hadn’t let slip a thing about his religion or how Asad
had pulled off the miracle of holding on to power for so long. Although we got along well
enough, ‘Ali was as clannish as the rest of the Alawites. He had no intention of tutoring me or
any other American official on what made Syria tick.

    I’m sure headquarters concluded that sending me to Damascus had been a
waste of a plane ticket and too much cab fare, but the trip hooked me on the Middle East,
mostly thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood. They were still a complete mystery to me - a riddle to
be solved. One thing did seem obvious. Even if Asad managed to rout the Brothers, they would
not go quietly back into their caves.

    INDIA PROVED to be a good rear base for keeping an eye on an
increasingly volatile Syria, and for filling the gaps in my learning that ‘Ali had declined to
tutor me on. The Brothers tried to assassinate Asad on June 25, 1980. I don’t know how close
they got, but it was close enough to really piss him off. The following morning Damascus woke
up to the whir of helicopters putting down at a military cantonment west of Damascus. The
copters loaded up two companies of Asad’s elite guard unit, the Defense Companies, then flew
east to Palmyra’s notorious military prison where Muslim Brothers were being held. Waiting
guards threw open the doors, and the Defense Companies stormed in, moving from cell to cell,
executing prisoners. The Brothers had only enough time to yell, “God is great! God is great!”
Although something like five hundred Brothers died that day, the Brotherhood wasn’t
intimidated.

    In February 1982 the Syrian Muslim Brothers seized Hama on the Orontes
River, Syria’s fourth largest city, with roots going back to the Bronze Age. When they started
to cut the throats of Alawite officials and their families, Asad acted. He called in the
Defense Companies again and ordered, “Level it.” After a couple days of continuous shelling,
the center of Hama was a smoldering pile of rubble. An estimated twenty thousand people were
killed, including, presumably, most of the Brothers. Hafiz al-Asad wasn’t happy to go down in
history as the butcher of Hama or the man who destroyed a world-class historic city, but it was
either that or run for it, along with one million other Alawites. The Brothers would never
again pose a serious threat to Asad.

    (An old Syrian joke has God sending the Angel of Death to Damascus to
summon Asad to judgment. A few days later, the angel returns to heaven, battered and bloody,
having been worked over by Asad’s notorious secret police. “Oh no,” God shrieks in horror, “you
didn’t tell them who sent you?”)

    Asad systematically removed anyone suspected of being a Brother from
any institution that had anything to do with Islam. Every cleric, Friday prayer leader,
soothsayer, corpse washer, and
madrasah
teacher was vetted and revetted. Even a
long-forgotten, veiled reference to jihad was enough to land a cleric in jail or put him out of
a job. Just as it had in the army, the system worked. By the time of Hafiz al-Asad’s death, the
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood existed in name only. There wasn’t a peep out of anyone when another
Alawite, Asad’s son Bashar, succeeded him. The only Syrian Brothers left to complain were in
exile, mostly in Saudi Arabia and Germany.

    The second part to Asad’s strategy will be familiar to any Mafia don.
Asad knew he had to keep his friends close and his enemies closer, which meant never letting
Saudi Arabia get out of sight. His brother Rifa’t al-Asad, the commander of the Defense
Companies, married the sister of Crown Prince ‘Abdallah’s wife. Closer to the jugular, Asad
held the threat of terrorism over the heads of the Al Sa’ud. His intelligence services kept
close ties with Palestinian terrorist groups who could strike at will inside Saudi Arabia, and
he made it crystal-clear to the Al Sa’ud that if they backed a terrorist attack in Syria, they
could expect a Palestinian attack in the return mail.

    Asad also courted the Saudi Shi’a opposition. Although they make up
only about 10 to 12 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population, the Shi’a provide the critical labor
for the oil fields in the Eastern Province. Almost as oppressed as Christians in Sunni-Wahhabi
Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a are prone to violence. Asad allowed the Shi’a leaders to open up
offices in Damascus and Beirut, as a reminder for the Al Sa’ud that he wasn’t above blowing up
their wells. It wasn’t long before Saudi “charity” money for the Brothers inside Syria dried
up.