Sleeping With The Devil (21 page)

    It was a typical Beirut day for me. Before the sun was up, I headed to
the tennis court for an hour of hitting the ball with the club pro. Perched in a pine grove on
a hill north of Beirut, the tennis club had an unimpeded view of the Mediterranean. You’d think
you were on the French Riviera… until about seven a.m., when the first Syrian 155-mm shell of
the morning would whistle over on its way to one of the Palestinian refugee camps south of
Beirut. The shells were a daily reminder that Arab solidarity was a myth, albeit one that
seemed almost impossible to destroy.

    By eight I was back at my apartment, sitting on my balcony with my
first espresso of the day. My Motorola radio, which I was supposed to keep within reach
twenty-four hours a day, crackled alive. “Lone Ranger, Lone Ranger.” It was Bill [text omitted]
my boss.

    Bill had been in Beirut a little less than a year. When he first
stepped off the Blackhawk at the embassy’s helo pad and fixed me with his Marine “you cross me
and I’ll break your neck” glare, I figured my Beirut days were numbered. As promised, things
didn’t go well at first. Morning one, Bill tore up one of my cables, barking that I could
either tighten my prose or catch the next helicopter out of Beirut. Mornings two and three
weren’t much better, but then something clicked between us. Maybe it was my knowledge of
Hizballah; maybe it was Bill’s loyalty to anyone under him who worked hard.

    “Lone Ranger,” Bill growled again. “Get your ass in the office -
now
.”

    Bill was sitting in the dark when I arrived. The electricity was off,
and for some reason, the generator hadn’t kicked in. Between the one-foot steel antirocket
walls, the Mylar-coated window, and the filthy curtains, which might have been new in 1947, you
could barely tell it was day. The one difference between Shawish’s bunker on the Green Line and
this lair was Bill’s Coleman lantern.

    Bill was sitting at his desk, looking, as usual, Buddhalike. (He’d put
on about fifty pounds since his Marine days.) Two Delta Force shooters stood at parade rest in
front of his desk. I knew both of them from the practice range. They could empty their Glock
9-mm pistols on a target from fifty feet and manage to clump every round into a hole about the
size of a quarter. I will call them Mack and Striker.

    “Now that Baer has graced us with his presence, we can start,” Bill
said, moving his lantern to see us better. Every other chair in Bill’s office was occupied with
flack vests, rations, and ammunition, so I stood with the shooters.

    “Do you know how
fucking
stupid Washington is?” Bill asked.

    He started his business day the same way every day, usually after he
finished reading the morning cable traffic from headquarters. I knew better than to respond.
Striker and Mack didn’t say anything, either. Delta shooters usually keep their politics to
themselves.

    Bill started off on a Washington riff but then suddenly changed his
mind and started talking about an old hijacking. On June 11, 1985, Fawaz Younis and a couple of
bangers from his southern-Beirut-suburbs neighborhood hijacked a Royal Jordanian airliner
preparing to take off from the Beirut airport. After subduing the guards, Younis demanded that
the pilot fly to Tunis, where he intended to address the Arab League. When that didn’t work, he
settled for off-loading the passengers and blowing up the airplane where it sat.

    Although no one died during the hijacking and it didn’t involve an
American airplane, two Americans had been on board. Technically, that put the hijacking under
American legal jurisdiction. The Department of Justice indicted Younis and issued a sealed
arrest warrant.

    No one would have paid any attention to Younis or the DOJ’s arrest
warrant - it was unclear whether he was a terrorist or just insane - if not for a confluence of
events. The CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center still hadn’t had a clearly identified success,
especially one that it could make public. Meanwhile, the bloody, spectacular terrorist events
mounted, and the White House was looking for a success, any success, to hold up in response.
Coincidentally, the CIA found out that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s office in Nicosia was
running a narcotics source named Jamal Hamdan, who happened to be Younis’s friend. It took CTC
about five seconds to concoct an operation to snatch Younis.

    It went like clockwork. An unarmed Younis was lured onto a pleasure
boat in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, arrested, and sent back to the United
States. You could almost hear the champagne corks popping from Nicosia to Langley to 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue. The FBI was delighted, too. It got one of its first international collars,
and the fact that female agents took part in the arrest helped the bureau pretend it was as
politically correct as the next bureaucracy in Washington. Even State was happy. By arresting
Younis away from Cyprus in international waters, it avoided irritating another client.
The
Washington Post
and
The New York Times
got to fill a few extra columns with a little
real-life drama. It was win-win-win all the way around. Heck, the hijacked Americans are
probably still dining out on the story.

    The only person who wasn’t happy, it seemed, was Bill [text omitted]
“Do you know how
fucking
stupid Washington is?” he asked again.

    I already knew about Fawaz Younis’s arrest. I’d followed it in cable
traffic as well as in the press. I assumed Striker and Mack knew something about it, too, but
since they didn’t say anything, there was no way of knowing for sure.

    “Now they’re sending this son of a bitch here for us to run. I don’t
like it, but I don’t have a choice.”

    Bill told us that Washington had decided Jamal Hamdan had done so well
in setting the trap for Fawaz Younis that it would turn him loose in Beirut to find the
hostages. It didn’t matter that Hamdan didn’t have the slightest idea who was holding them or
even where to start looking. This was a headquarters decision. Bill could comply or go back to
the Marines.

    “So why do we have to run him?” I asked. Cyprus could have put him on a
plane directly to Beirut International Airport, which was in the west, where the hostages were
being held.

    Bill grinned like the Grinch who stole Christmas as he handed me a
sheaf of Arabic documents: murder indictments from the Lebanese state prosecutor’s office. When
I looked closer, I noticed they all bore the name of Jamal Hamdan - the same Jamal Hamdan the
Beirut [text omitted]was supposed to handle. The last person he was accused of killing was his
sister. He’d put a twelve-gauge shotgun to her head and blown it off. She’d apparently dated a
guy Jamal hadn’t approved of.

    “The reason we have to take the son of a bitch here in the east is
because he can’t go to West Beirut. He’d be immediately arrested for murder,” Bill answered.

    As it turned out, Jamal had conveniently killed all of his victims in
West Beirut. Although the Christians in East Beirut knew he was a murderer, they would never
honor the arrest warrant of a Muslim prosecutor. Legalisms aside, killing Muslims was the point
in East Beirut in those days.

    Bill turned to the Delta shooters. “Baer’s going to run Hamdan. But you
don’t take orders from Baer; you take them from me. And right now all I want you to do is pick
Hamdan up from the helicopter and follow Baer to a safe house. Hamdan is not to leave the safe
house. If he as much as touches the doorknob like he’s going to leave, or attempts to climb out
of the window, shoot and kill him.”

    Ah, finally some emotion from the Delta boys! Until then they’d
probably thought Bill had gone soft since becoming a CIA spook. Now he was starting to make
sense.

    That night I didn’t get any sleep. Hamdan was restless and paced around
the safe house like a caged animal. Every time he got within a foot of the front door, Striker
would reach for the Glock under his vest, eyeing the spot in the back of Jamal’s head where he
planned to double-tap him. I hurriedly steered Hamdan away from the door. I could just imagine
the cable exchange with Washington.

    Over the next two days, I drove Hamdan from one public telephone to
another so he could call his contacts in West Beirut. As Bill had predicted, Hamdan never
produced a reliable piece of information on the hostages. By day three, we had all had enough.
Bill called the head of European Command, to whom Beirut’s Blackhawks technically belonged.
I’ll never forget his bellowing at whatever the four star’s name was: “It’s none of your
goddamned business why I need the helicopters. The only thing
you
have to think about is
making sure they’re on the LZ at 1800.” Indeed, two Blackhawks put down at the LZ exactly on
time, and that was the last we saw of Jamal Hamdan.

    He was resettled in the United States along with most of his extended
family. As for Bill, he never let up in his battle against Washington. He went from one
hardship post to another until headquarters discovered that he was a great secret weapon
against the State Department and sent him as chief to anywhere the CIA was having a problem
with an ambassador.

    TODAY it sounds like a Monty Python skit. But it was while we were
doing these things - chasing down Fawaz Younis and running scum like Jamal Hamdan - that we
missed the whole phenomenon of militant Sunni Islam. The attempts against Nasser and Asad,
Sadat’s assassination, Hama: They were looked at as isolated events, strictly local problems.
No one connected the dots. The shadow war against Iran had us facing entirely in the wrong
direction.

    The destruction of Hama was the best example. Washington put the blame
for it squarely on Asad’s shoulders - an act of pure inhumanity ordered by a brutal dictator.
The reasoning on the banks of the pristine Potomac was that if only Damascus had a friendly,
pro-Western, democratic government, Hama never would have happened. But no one thought it
through. If elections had been held in Syria at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood would have
won.

    Dig a little deeper, and you’d have no trouble finding some Washington
“never heard a shot fired in anger” think-tank hawk who looked at Hama as a good thing.
Leveling the place was sure to inspire the Syrian Brothers to wreak revenge on Asad’s Alawites.
And how bad could that be? The Alawites might have called themselves Arab Ba’th socialists, but
as far as the hawks were concerned, they were Arab communists. Considering the Alawites had
their Soviet-built SS-21s trained on Tel Aviv, they were dangerous communists, at that. The
feeling in this group was simple: The fewer Alawites, the better.

    This kind of thinking turned out to be criminally shortsighted. Long
before the World Trade Center towers fell, anyone who looked at the facts objectively
understood that the Brotherhood was ready to blow up in our face. Yet even after the massacre
at Aleppo and the takeover of Hama, no one in Washington thought to yell, “Fire in the hole!”

    On October 26, 1988, a Brother named Hashim ‘Abassi was rounded up in
the so-called Autumn Leaves arrests in Neuss, Germany. ‘Abassi was part of a cell of Islamic
militants that included his brother-in-law and the group’s leader, Muhammad Hafiz Dalkimoni,
who were planning to blow up five civilian jetliners. Although ‘Abassi and most of the other
Autumn Leaves conspirators were behind bars when Pan Am 103 exploded, the investigators’
initial hypothesis was that they still had something to do with it. The lead was dropped when
the investigators settled on two Libyans as the sole culprits. Today we know this was a
mistake. If someone had bothered to look into ‘Abassi and his Syrian Muslim Brotherhood cell,
we might have been led to the Hamburg cell.

    September 11 was almost a class reunion for the Syrian Muslim Brothers.
One of the key figures in the German apparatus, Mamoun Darkazanli, fled from Syria to Germany
after Hama. Although Darkazanli denied advance knowledge of 9/11, he admitted to providing help
to three of the hijackers. A former Syrian intelligence officer familiar with Darkanzali told
me that he had participated in the attack on the Aleppo artillery school in 1979. Another key
Muslim Brotherhood player in September 11, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, likely arranged for the
hijackers’ training in bin Laden’s Afghani camps. A third, ‘Abd-al-Matin Tatari, ran a
Brotherhood front company in Hamburg. Tatari’s son was close to Muhammad Atta and the the
Hamburg cell members. Two Syrian Brothers in Spain probably provided support to the hijackers.
The details are beyond the scope of this book, but the point is that although Washington
disliked Asad almost as much as the Brothers did, Asad was definitely on to something when he
decided the Syrian Brothers were bad news. Hama and Allepo weren’t merely local problems, as
we’d been told.