Sleeping With The Devil (20 page)

    IN LATE 1985, I was assigned to the CIA’s new Counter-Terrorism Center
and started to poke around headquarters archives to see if there was anything authoritative
there on the Brothers. It wasn’t easy. Although the purpose of CTC was to bring all CIA files
and experts under one roof, no one followed radical Sunni Muslims. CTC had specialists for
everything else, from the Japanese Red army to the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, but not one for
the most adept terrorists of them all: the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Post-9/11, it’s easy to say what a mistake it was to leave out the
Sunnis, but even back then I thought it was odd. After all, in 1979 Sunni fundamentalists took
over the Mecca mosque, shaking the Sa’ud royal family to its bones. A special French police
team had to be brought in to take the mosque back because the Saudi army refused to take
orders. In the middle of it all, a Sunni fundamentalist mob burned the U.S. embassy in
Islamabad. Militant Sunnis were a much bigger threat to the United States than the Japanese Red
army, for God’s sake, yet the CIA still didn’t have a single source in the Brothers. The files
I did find were stuffed with old newspaper clippings, a few analytical pieces, and cables from
embassies.

    What I did come across that was interesting was the trial of the
Islamic Jihad members who assassinated Sadat. It was especially instructive on how the Islamic
Jihad had wormed its way into elite units of the Egyptian military and through the tight
security screen surrounding the October 6 parade. Via an elaborate recruitment of key people,
they smuggled into the barracks boxes of ammunition to load their Kalashnikovs; live ammunition
wasn’t supposed to be within miles of the parade. It underscored the importance of having
someone bless such an act. For Sadat’s assassination, that person was ‘Umar ‘Abd-al-Rahman, the
blind sheikh currently in jail in the United States.

    What really struck me was the way the Islamic Jihad cited a
thirteenth-century Syrian cleric to justify the murder. Ibn Taymiyah was born in 1263 in
Harraan, near what is now Urfa in Turkey, but spent most of his life in Damascus, where his
father had fled from the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyah’s numerous polemics and other writings attacking
orthodox theology had made him one of the most controversial figures of his day. In 1306 an
Islamic court imprisoned him for his heresies, and he spent most of the rest of his life behind
bars, in Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus. He died in 1328. That much was relatively easy to
find, but why had Ibn Taymiyah become, in essence, the patron saint of the Brothers? And what
did the writings of a cleric who had been dead for more than 650 years have to do with the
present slaughter in the Middle East?

    More and more, these seemed to be vital questions. A tide of history
was playing out under our noses, and we were looking everywhere but the right place for the
reasons.

    IN 1986 some exiled Syrian Muslim Brothers in Germany knocked on the
door of the U.S. embassy in Bonn, thinking America might be thrilled with their latest plot to
take down Hafiz al-Asad. As I described in
See No Evil
, I jumped at the chance to meet
them, but other than finding out they had an SA-7 buried at the end of the Damascus airport,
ready to shoot down Asad’s plane, I didn’t learn a whole lot about them. I didn’t need to fly
out to Germany to know they wanted to kill Asad. A year later in Beirut, I got my chance to
spend some quality face-to-face time with a Muslim Brother. I even got a couple of quick
lessons in jihad.

    In April 1987 I’d been in Beirut almost a year when I heard about a
Syrian Muslim Brother living in East Beirut named Zuhayr Shawish. My first thought was: What is
an Islamic fundamentalist doing living in a strictly Christian enclave? Just as quickly, I
reminded myself that the Lebanese Christians were at war with Syria and needed all the friends
they could get, even a Muslim fanatic who preached that the East’s Christians should be fed to
the Red Sea’s sharks along with the Jews. It was Tom Twetten’s rule again. I arranged to meet
Shawish.

    I checked around about Shawish. At one time he had been a fairly
well-known figure in Syria, even a member of parliament. When the Syrian government cracked
down on the Brothers, he was forced to leave. After a detour through Saudi Arabia and a few
other places, he landed in Beirut in the early 1980s and now ran an Islamic bookstore, or at
least that was what he told people. (If Shawish was making a living selling Qur’ans to
Christians, he was one hell of a salesman.)

    Meeting him wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t walk into his bookstore
and introduce myself as his friendly neighborhood CIA agent. Even if the United States was the
nominal ally of the Lebanese Christian Maronites, Shawish had no reason to talk to the CIA or
any other American official. It was probably a toss-up whether he hated the CIA, Israel, or the
Alawites more. What I needed was what the CIA calls cover for action - another of those lies
woven out of whole cloth.

    I came up with the idea that I would pose as an American of Lebanese
heritage, a Muslim who had grown up in the United States. That would explain my flawed Arabic
and my ignorance about Islam. The cover was weak as rooster soup, but that’s the best I could
do.

    The part of East Beirut that Shawish lived in was one of the most
exposed neighborhoods on the Green Line, the no-man’s-land that separated Christian parts of
the city from the Muslim side: a short, clear sniper shot from Hizballah’s front line. As soon
as I turned down Shawish’s street, I gunned the Peugeot. A heavy metal gate was already opening
from the inside as I pulled up in front of Shawish’s house. It closed behind me as soon as I
was inside.

    Shawish’s house was dark as a grave. Fifty-gallon drums stuffed with
sand blocked all windows and doorways. Sandbags and boxes of books filled the few remaining
spaces. The electricity was off; it probably had been in that part of Beirut for months. It
looked like Shawish couldn’t afford a generator, or maybe he just didn’t care.

    I was shown into another dark room where I found Shawish sitting on a
tattered rug, his legs crossed under him, reading by candlelight. A flannel cloak and layers of
robes covered him, but I could tell he was a large man. With his salt-and-pepper beard and the
cracked lens of his glasses, he looked every bit the fiery Islamic radical.

    Shawish didn’t stand to greet me but pointed to a space on his rug that
he wasn’t already taking up. “So you want to learn about Islam?” he asked. So far, so good; he
hadn’t challenged the cover story.

    Shawish launched into a sermon about the sorry state of Islam. That
morning he was particularly irked that Jerusalem had become the epicenter of the Middle East
conflict. “There are only two holy cities in Islam,” Shawish said, still speaking calmly.
“Medina and Mecca.”

    For the next hour, he provided a detailed exegesis of exactly where
Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock stood in the canons of Islam. Every other sentence was a
quote from the Qur’an or the sayings of the prophet. (I silently thanked Khalid for throwing me
into the deep end of classical Arabic.) I knew we were coming to the end when Shawish launched
into a tirade against Yasir Arafat. Shawish accused him of having politicized Jerusalem solely
for the Palestinians’ sake. “Arafat is a dog and a liar,” he said in not very classical Arabic.
I recognized that as straight Wahhabi propaganda: They hated anyone who contested the supremacy
of the two holy cities they occupied.

    Shawish would have gone on about Arafat forever if there hadn’t been a
burst of machine-gun fire. It sounded like it was coming from a position opposite his house,
across the Green Line.

    I quickly slipped in my question: “Ever heard about Ibn Taymiyah?” It
was beyond naive, but I’d pegged Shawish as not caring who I was. Even if I were to break
cover, he still would have agreed to tutor me in Islam.

    “Ibn Taymiyah?
Anna Abb ibn Taymiyah
” - “I am Ibn Taymiyah’s
father.” It was Shawish’s way of saying he knew more about Ibn Taymiyah than even the man
himself. “What do you want to know about him?”

    Shawish had extended the handle I was looking for. “I have always
wanted to study Ibn Taymiyah,” I said. “Would you have the time to instruct me?”

    It was a lie, of course. I’d never even seen the cover of one of Ibn
Taymiyah’s books, but I was about to.

    For the next year, every time I had a chance, I ventured down to the
Green Line to see Shawish. We’d sit there for hours reading Ibn Taymiyah line by line, book by
book. Considering Ibn Taymiyah wrote in the thirteenth century for well-educated Muslims, his
Arabic was surprisingly accessible. His conclusions were just as accessible: Islam had to be
purified. All the accretions that had attached themselves to Islam since the times of the
prophet were like barnacles on a boat. They had to be scraped off. Muslims should refer only to
the original texts.

    For us in the West, the more important part of Ibn Taymiyah’s peculiar
take on Islam was that Islamic militants drew on his writings to justify the murder of
Christian civilians. Since Christians supported the Crusaders, the thinking went, they deserved
death. It was also the obligation of a good Muslim to die for the cause. In his book
Murder
on the Nile
, J. Bowyer Bell quotes from Ibn Taymiyah’s writings: “Death of the martyrs for
the unification of all the people in the cause of God and His word is the happiest, best,
easiest, and most virtuous of deaths.” Ibn Taymiyah was the source of authority that called for
assassinating Anwar Sadat. Even a Muslim deserves death if he has made common cause with
Islam’s enemies, and Sadat’s Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Israeli prime minister Menachem
Begin, proved he had done so. Ibn Taymiyah’s fingerprints were all over September 11, too. The
people in the World Trade Center deserved to die because they paid the taxes that went to
sending aid to Israel that was used to buy the weapons that killed Muslims.

    Most important, Shawish taught me that Muslim Brothers weren’t alone in
their devotion to Ibn Taymiyah. He reviewed the history of how, when Muhammad Ibn
‘Abd-al-Wahhab started preaching in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century, he drew heavily on
the sage of Damascus. Ever since, Ibn Taymiyah has been the mainstay of Wahhabi Islam, later
joined by the Brothers’ radical interpretation of Islam. No wonder the two of them got along so
well: It was like the Brothers were coming home.

    MY LESSONS with Shawish were strictly off the books. The CIA had sent
me to Beirut to look for the hostages kidnapped by Iran. The first taken was David Dodge, the
acting president of the American University in Beirut. He was kidnapped in 1982, but scores
more were snatched in the following years. President Reagan had taken a personal interest in
their fate. More than that, the hostages’ captor, Iran, had obsessed the Reagan administration.

    In November 1979 Iran had unofficially declared war on the United
States when partisans of Ayatollah Khomeini occupied our embassy in Tehran. On April 18, 1983,
Iran blew up our embassy in Beirut. On October 23, 1983, it killed 241 Marines with a truck
bomb, and Reagan was forced to pull American forces out of Lebanon. On December 12, 1983, Iran
struck again, bombing the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. On March 16, 1984, it kidnapped
Bill Buckley, Beirut’s CIA chief, effectively closing down American intelligence operations in
a city that used to be our main listening post for the Middle East. In other words, in four
short years, Iran had run the United States out of two countries - Iran and Lebanon. That’s why
Beirut was preoccupied with the hostages and had no time for Shawish or Sunni fundamentalism.
Obviously, I’d figured this out, but I wouldn’t understand how distracted the Reagan
administration was until I was given a front-row seat to one of the silliest operations the
Central Intelligence Agency ever ran.