Sleeping With The Devil (22 page)

    JUST AS WE’D MISSED the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, so we missed it in
Kuwait. We were looking the other way and didn’t see Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, one of the
strangest and most lethal insects to crawl out from under the wreckage of the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon.

    Born in Kuwait in 1965, KSM (as he’s known in the alphabet soup of the
intelligence world) was the son of two immigrants from Balachistan, a remote, uncivilized
province of Pakistan. His parents had moved to Kuwait hoping to cash in on the oil boom.
Instead, they ended up in a desert grease pit called Fahaheel, where they were treated the same
way as all the other South Asians living in the Gulf - like coolies.

    The one political outlet KSM’s family was given, it took. His father
became a local mosque leader; his mother, a corpse washer, which in Islam is a religious
position. The sons would take Islam one step further, turning to its dark side. One of KSM’s
brothers joined the Brotherhood in the 1980s, when he was at the university. Apparently under
his influence, KSM also joined.

    The Brotherhood was a sanctioned organization in Kuwait, just as it was
in Saudi Arabia. In fact, it was encouraged. When Yasir Arafat was forced to leave Egypt
because of his association with the Brotherhood, the Kuwaitis happily took him and the other
Palestinian Brothers. That burnished the royal family’s Palestinian and Islamic credentials.
When Arafat moved on, the accommodating Kuwaitis backed the Islamic Association of Palestinian
Students as a recruiting vehicle for Hamas.

    Naturally, the Kuwait Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t even on Washington’s
radar screen. Like Hama and Sadat’s assassination, it was another local problem, not
Washington’s concern. Let the Kuwaitis sort it out. Besides, this was the early 1980s, right in
the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Keeping in mind that the Kuwaiti Shi’a - almost a third of
Kuwait’s population - were believed to be sympathetic to Iran, who had time to worry about the
Brothers? Christ,
our
oil fields were in range of the Iranian and Iraqi big guns. You
could even hear them from Kuwait City.

    In 1983, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad applied for a visa to study at
Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, no one paid him the least attention. He was one
more Middle Easterner hoping for a U.S. engineering degree, no doubt expecting to return and
work in the oil industry. (The same thing would happen in Khartoum when the visa officer didn’t
recognize the blind sheikh ‘Umar ‘Abd-al-Rahman. It didn’t matter that his name and face had
been splattered across the front pages of the world’s press as the man who’d handed down the
fatwa to assassinate Sadat.)

    Like his brothers, KSM found his way to Afghanistan, where he hooked up
with Sayyaf, the Afghan Muslim Brother and ally of Saudi Arabia. It was in Peshawar that he met
Osama bin Laden and all the other jihadi fanatics from whom he would learn the tools of
terrorism. There was nothing like ambushing a Soviet armor column to test your mettle, see who
would die for Allah and who wouldn’t. Presumably, it was then that bin Laden came to trust KSM
enough to commit mass murder on September 11.

    Needless to say, the CIA in Pakistan saw none of this coming. The White
House orders had been clear: Send the bastards all the arms and ammunition they need, but let
them do the fighting and stay out of their hair. Anyhow, the Afghans didn’t need training in
murder. They learned that when they climbed out of the crib. Basically, the Afghan war for the
CIA was purely a logistics exercise. It didn’t even have much contact with the resistance
groups, which meant that the CIA and Washington were as blind as the sheikh, and the Muslim
Brotherhood was its Invisible Man. We didn’t see it because we didn’t want to.

    This approach was never so evident as in Saudi Arabia. When Nasser
closed down the Brotherhood in 1954, the militants fled to Saudi Arabia, where they were
welcomed with open arms. The Brothers knew their Ibn Taymiyah; they could teach the Qur’an; and
they would work for pennies. For the radical Wahhabis, this was a match made in heaven. Before
long, Egyptian Brothers were occupying many of the important chairs in the religious faculties
of Saudi Arabia’s universities and
madrasahs
. By 1961 the Brotherhood had become so
entrenched in the kingdom that it convinced King Sa’ud to fund an Islamic university in the
holy city of Medina to replace Cairo’s al-Azhar, the historical center of Islamic learning. The
Brothers claimed that Nasser had destroyed al-Azhar.

    Saudi Arabia even pimped for the Brothers. In the summer of 1971 King
Faysal arranged for a delegation of Brothers to travel from Saudi Arabia to try to reconcile
with Sadat. The head of the Brotherhood delegation, Sa’id Ramadan, was on the Saudi payroll as
director of a Geneva-based organization called the Centre Islamique. Although Sadat and the
Brothers never reached an agreement, Saudi Arabia had shown its hand. Egypt’s most famous
journalist, Mohamed Heikel, chronicled the meeting in his book
Autumn of Fury
.

    By the early 1970s no one doubted that Saudi Arabia had become the
Brothers’ rear base. All along, Washington pretended the Brotherhood didn’t exist, and it
wasn’t like folks there didn’t know what it was. Call Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brothers
what you want, but by today’s definition, they were terrorists. Al-Banna’s slogan for the
Brotherhood left no doubt:

    

    God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Qur’an our
constitution, jihad our way and dying for God’s cause our supreme objective.

    

    Those could have been the final words of the September 11 hijackers.

    TO SEE THE EXPLOSIVE EFFECT of mixing Brothers and Wahhabis, look at
Osama bin Laden’s trajectory into militant Islam. As a student at the King ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz
University, bin Laden fell under the influence of two Muslim Brothers: ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam and
Muhammad Qutb. ‘Azzam, a Jordanian Palestinian, had been recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood
as a student at Cairo’s al-Azhar University. Soon he would become known as the “Amir of Jihad,”
and by then the only country that would take him was Saudi Arabia, which gave him a teaching
job at the university. ‘Azzam and bin Laden would spend time together in Peshawar, Pakistan,
during the Afghan war.

    Qutb was the brother of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ most extremist
militant, Sayyid Qutb. Sayyid did more to radicalize the Brotherhood than anyone. Like some
latter-day Ibn Taymiyah, he sold the Brothers on the idea that all Christians and Jews were
infidels who deserved to be killed. Egypt executed Sayyid in 1966, but his doctrine lived on.
One of bin Laden’s brother-in-laws was a fund-raiser for the Muslim Brotherhood.

    As far as I can see, the reason Washington wore these blinders -
especially to Saudi Arabia, which nurtured the viper at its breast for all these years - was
twofold. One, the Brothers were on our side in the cold war, offering us a cheap,
no-American-casualties way to fight the Soviet Union. Two, the Saudis were banking our oil. As
with any other addiction, we were in no position to challenge the pusher. It felt great until
the withdrawal on September 11.

    By then, though, addiction had become the wrong metaphor. The
Brotherhood was more like a cancer, well established in its host organ but treatable so long as
it hadn’t spread its tentacles throughout the body. The question was: Had it metastasized? I
had begun searching for that answer almost a decade earlier, in as grim a corner of the planet
as I ever hope to see.

    

    

    

    THE FADED BLONDE built like a Siberian woodstove was fuming. Every time
she tried to escape from behind the Aeroflot counter, a knot of stubborn, broad-faced Kyrgyz
peasants blocked her way. With the last flight to Osh scheduled to depart in twenty minutes,
they weren’t about to move until she handed over their boarding passes. They didn’t care that
the flight would probably be hours late. They didn’t care that handing out boarding passes
wasn’t her job. And they certainly didn’t care that it was her Aeroflot-sanctioned tea break.
One thing the Kyrgyz had learned from living on the remote edge of the Soviet empire: Passive
resistance was the only way to get your way.

    Catching sight of me on the other side of her counter, impatiently
waving my own ticket to Osh, didn’t improve the Aeroflot lady’s mood. My Levi’s, T-shirt, and
North Face parka pegged me as one more pain-in-the-ass tourist setting off to discover Central
Asia. My “first-class” Intourist ticket - the “upgrade” cost the rough equivalent of a New York
City subway token - didn’t make the slightest impression on her. Neither did my shiny black
American diplomatic passport. She pointed a fat finger at a broken banquette of chairs in the
corner of the terminal, which I think was supposed to be Intourist’s exclusive waiting lounge.
“Wait like everyone else,” she said.

    I suppose she had seen her share of problems with Western tourists.
Ever since Kyrgyzstan opened up, climbers, trekkers, and hunters regularly got lost in the Tien
Shan Mountains. Aeroflot or the Kyrgyz air force then had to risk one of their helicopters to
rescue them. Then there were the brigands -
basmachi
, as they’re called in Russian - who
would sometimes kidnap tourists. When that happened, the Kyrgyz army had to deploy troops to
free the hostages and drive the
basmachi
back up into the high mountains.

    One of the stranger cases I’d heard about involved a car full of Dutch
who tried to retrace the ancient Silk Route from Osh to a dusty oasis town in western China
called Kashgar. They had all the necessary Chinese visas, but the Chinese guards on the Kyrgyz
border apparently had never seen a visa before. Or maybe they were suspicious of the bicycles
tied to the top of the Dutchmen’s car. Anyhow, the border guards wouldn’t let them in. An
appeal to Beijing wasn’t possible; there were no telephone connections to Beijing. The Dutch
had no choice but to turn back. Before they did, though, they slammed shut the giant iron gate
that separated China from Kyrgyzstan and locked it with a bicycle chain. No one bothered to cut
it for months, or so went the story.

    If pressed, the Aeroflot lady probably would have told me I had no
business going to Osh. For most of its modern existence, in Czarist and Soviet times alike, Osh
was strictly verboten to foreigners. It was a “strategic site,” and “diplomats” like me could
mean only trouble. It would take a Soviet hand to explain the logic behind putting a hole like
Osh off limits, or why the Soviet Union was so paranoid about central Asia. I suppose it was a
hangover from the Great Game - the war of shadows Britain and Russia fought in the nineteenth
century for control of the region. Russia was convinced that Britain intended to undermine its
empire through Central Asia, and Britain thought Russia was trying to do the same thing in
India.

    Britain didn’t do anything to help Russia get over its paranoia. During
the nineteenth century, the British infiltrated a few missions north of the Amu Darya, the
shallow, muddy river that separates Russian Central Asia from Afghanistan. Most of those who
crossed into places like Osh stayed a little while, patted themselves on the back for having
played and survived the Great Game, and beat a retreat south for the more refined comforts of
the subcontinent. Ultimately, the Russians would learn they had more to fear from Islam than
they did from the British.

    The first serious Islamic uprising against the Soviets in Central Asia
occurred in 1918. Trading in a Czarist for a communist yoke was definitely a bad deal for
Central Asia’s Muslims. A month after their October 1917 victory far to the north, the
Bolsheviks sent a detachment to seize the important regional capital of Tashkent. The new
commissars began by requisitioning all the food they could lay their hands on and seizing the
cotton crop in the name of the people’s republic. A famine soon followed that would kill as
many as a million Central Asians. In February 1918 Bolshevik troops put down a revolt in the
ancient Uzbek caravan city of Kokand, sacking and slaughtering as they went, and the
basmachi
revolt was on.