Sleeping With The Devil (23 page)

    While the Bolsheviks were occupied by consolidating their victory
elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the uprising spread. Victory followed on victory. At its height,
the rebellion counted maybe twenty thousand soldiers in its ranks, most of them peasant
fighters, all of them Muslims. The end, though, seemed foreordained. The communists outnumbered
the
basmachi
; they had heavy weapons; and after the White Russians were defeated, the
rebels got the Reds’ full attention. By 1920 the
basmachi
had been driven back into the
mountains of Tajikistan. That’s when Enver Pasha showed up.

    Turkey’s minister of war during World War I, Enver Pasha fled to Berlin
after the defeat of the Central Powers, and then went to Moscow at Lenin’s invitation. Lenin
wanted to use the charismatic Turk to draw Central Asia’s Muslims into the Soviet fold, but as
it turned out, Pasha had a grander vision: a pan-Turkic state that would stretch from the
Straits of Bosporus to Mongolia. He was only thirty-two.

    In February 1922, Pasha captured Dushanbe, the capital of modern
Tajikistan. By the end of spring, he had taken control of virtually all of the emirate of
Bokhara. In July 1922 the Soviets were forced to react to Pasha’s treachery and sent a division
south to stop him. It worked. He was killed in battle on August 4 of that year. But the
basmachi
wouldn’t be completely snuffed out until 1934. Some of the rebels, it was
thought, holed up in the remote mountain valleys of Tajikistan. Most took refuge in
Afghanistan. More than a few slipped as far away as Saudi Arabia. Some took up residence in
Mecca and became dyed-in-the-wool Wahhabis.

    Islamic fundamentalism wouldn’t threaten Russian domination of Central
Asia again until 1979, but that was a dandy. For millennia, Afghanistan was the main corridor
of East-West trade, which meant that it was also subject to almost constant invasion and
occupation. Afghanistan’s current troubles started in 1973, when a military coup ushered in the
nation’s first republic, momentarily ending centuries of foreign and tribal rule. Five years
later, Soviet-backed leftists seized control of the government in a bloody coup, and the new
government immediately signed economic and military treaties with Moscow.

    It didn’t take long for the Islamic world to react. In March 1979
Muslim fundamentalists seized control of the 17th Division of the Afghan army, headquartered in
Herat. The revolt immediately started to spread, promising to infect the rest of Afghanistan.
Equally threatening for the Soviets, the new Islamic regime in Tehran seemed ready to fuel the
uprising. A militant Islamic government in Kabul was the Soviets’ worst nightmare.

    They panicked. During an emergency late-night meeting on March 17,
Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko reported to the politburo: “The insurgents infiltrating into
the territory of Herat Province from Pakistan and Iran have joined forces with a domestic
counter-revolution. The latter is especially comprised of religious fanatics. The leaders of
the reactionary masses are also linked in large part with the religious figures.” In other
words, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly face-to-face with an Islamic jihad. Memories of the
basmachi
revolt hung in the air like a putrid corpse. No one needed to be reminded that
that
revolt had nearly undone the October revolution, or that the Soviet Union’s
mountainous border with Afghanistan couldn’t contain an Islamic tidal wave rolling in from the
south.

    The situation deteriorated by the day. When it appeared that the
government in Kabul couldn’t hold on any longer, the Red Army invaded. The first troops crossed
the border on Christmas Eve 1979. For the Soviet Union, it turned out to be a mistake of
biblical proportions. All its money, soldiers, T-72 tanks, and Mi-24 Hind gunships counted for
nothing in stopping Afghans with faith on their side.

    Ten years later, as the Soviet Union itself was starting to implode,
the last Soviet soldier was driven from Afghanistan. As the politburo had feared, the chaos in
Afghanistan sloshed across the border like a backed-up sewer. In 1990 ethnic riots broke out
between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Osh. More than a thousand people died. The three Soviet republics
that shared the Fergana Valley - Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - put their armed forces on
a permanent state of alert, knowing the trouble would spread. In 1991 a twenty-four-year-old
Uzbek named Tahir Yuldashev led an Islamic uprising in Namangan, about halfway between Osh and
Tashkent. Islamic rebels paraded around thieves and prostitutes, back to front, on donkeys,
beating them with whips in front of the mosques. When the uprising was brutally supressed,
Yuldashev fled to Afghanistan and formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Until the American
attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, the IMU conducted a sporadic terrorist campaign against
Tashkent, infiltrating cadres through the Fergana.

    FOR WASHINGTON, an Islamic resurgence in Central Asia would have been
of little interest except for one thing: the region’s enormous oil and gas reserves, second
only to the Gulf’s. The bulk of the oil lies under Kazakstan, while the gas is under
Turkmenistan. At an estimated 260 billion barrels of oil reserves, and with greater gas
reserves than all of North America, the Caspian region could keep the U.S. warm and lighted,
and our factories humming, for a long time. The only problem was getting it out. Kazakstan and
Turkmenistan are out in the middle of the remote, inhospitable, and landlocked Eurasian steppe.

    Under the Soviet Union, Central Asia’s energy was exported west to
Russia and Eastern Europe via an intricate web of pipelines. That had been the rub with Central
Asian gas and oil. Nearly all of the pipe it traveled through passed through Russia. The
Russians could and did shut down exports at will, which gave them a stranglehold over the
countries that owned the energy. Energy has value only when there’s a delivery system.
Otherwise, it’s better left in the ground.

    As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Washington decided it
could turn Central Asia’s energy into a strategic asset. Why not bypass the Russian pipeline
system by finding alternative export routes? Doing so would pry Russian’s dead hand off the
Central Asian states and make them economically independent. In no time, democracy would bloom.
Even better in some ways, with the Caspian’s 260 billion barrels of oil fully and freely
exportable; we wouldn’t need Middle Eastern oil. Let Saddam invade Kuwait again. Who cared? For
that matter, let him invade Saudi Arabia. On paper, it was a sure winner, if only new pipelines
could be worked out.

    The Great Game seemed to be back on, but this time with the U.S.
squared off against the two largest regional powers: Russia and Iran. Naturally, American oil
companies queued up to play. Chevron and Mobil, the biggest participants, bought giant
concessions in Kazakstan. Amoco bought a mega-field in Azerbaijan. Unocal, the gutsiest of the
American companies, drew up plans for a pair of pipelines across Afghanistan.

    Everyone seemed to have conveniently ignored the endless political
instability in the region - and the absence of any energy transport grid. How would Chevron,
Mobil, and Amoco get their oil out of the Caspian? The safest pipeline route was through Russia
to the Black Sea, and from there via tanker to the Mediterranean, but Russia and the Russian
mob liked nothing better than blackmailing American oil companies. They charged, on average,
three dollars for every ton of oil they put into the system. There was an alternative route to
Turkey, but that would have to pass through either Georgia or Armenia, both embroiled in civil
wars; Afghanistan, too, was in the middle of a vicious civil war. It would be a long time
before anyone laid five feet of pipe there.

    Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, watched in disbelief. It was pure folly to
think of Central Asian oil as an alternative to Middle Eastern oil, the Saudis said. Forget the
political instability. Just look at the costs. The capital expenses for lifting Caspian Sea oil
was roughly six dollars a barrel, while lifting a Saudi barrel cost only one to two. In the oil
business, that was not an insignificant split, especially in the early and mid-1990s, when oil
was dragging the bottom close to ten dollars a barrel. Throw in the price of building two main
oil-export pipelines - adding up to something like $7 billion - and the Caspian Sea made no
sense at all, particularly to the Saudis.

    The Saudis knew why the oil companies were buying in: It boosted their
paper reserves. They could “overbook” all those exotic Caspian Sea reserves, and the average
shareholder wouldn’t be any the wiser; he wouldn’t understand how difficult it would be to get
them out. But what Saudi Arabia couldn’t figure out was what the United States government was
up to. The cold war was over, so who cared whether Central Asia was independent from Russia?
Saudi Arabia knew Washington, whether it made economic sense or not, might put its financial
weight behind Caspian oil. If the U.S. invested enough money, it might make the fantasy come to
life. Even worse in some ways, the Saudis felt jilted. They had spent tens of billions of
dollars to finance the Gulf War. The cost was ruinous in a down market for oil, but the U.S.
had insisted that the war was necessary to maintain the status quo - to keep Saddam from
invading Saudi Arabia and to assure that the House of Sa’ud would remain the world’s banker of
oil.

    Angry at Washington and wary of its motives, the Saudis kept their own
finger on the pulse of the Caspian. Delta Oil, associated with Crown Prince ‘Abdallah and other
powerful Saudis, invested in a concession in Azerbaijan. (Anger at Washington, it should be
noted, didn’t prevent Delta Oil from enlisting two American partners in the cause. Business is
business.) After I left the CIA, I learned that Saudi intelligence under Turki Al Faysal
partnered with the Argentine company Bridas to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan, passing though Afghanistan. It was the perfect match for Bridas, because Turki had
better relations with the Taliban than any Saudi. He’d dumped hundreds of millions of riyals
into them.

    Black gold, ethnic conflict, Islamic fundamentalism, civil war, Russian
irredentism - the Great Game was back on for sure. But who was playing and who wasn’t? And what
were the rules this time around? That’s what I intended to find out.

    THE FORTY-MINUTE FLIGHT from Bishkek to Osh gave me a chance to collect
my thoughts about what I expected to learn in the Fergana and how. Islamic fundamentalism was
waging a war without fronts or faces. Back at headquarters, I had tried to find a picture of
the IMU leader, Yuldashev. There wasn’t one. How would I know if I was staring him in the face?
Worrying about things like that kept me from looking out the airplane window as the Yak-40’s
right wing passed within spitting range of a 4,875-meter snow-covered peak.

    I had a lot of time on my hands. The month before, in October 1992, I
had been evacuated from neighboring Tajikistan in the midst of a civil war between ex-Soviet
apparatchiks and Islamic fundamentalists. CIA headquarters ordered me back to Washington, where
I was supposed to wait until I could go back and reopen the place. Since there was nothing
worse than being assigned to headquarters with little to do, I used all the skills of
persuasion I’d learned in the agency to convince the head of the Central Eurasian Division,
John McGaffin, to let me take a grand tour of Central Asia. He didn’t see the problem. He even
approved my spending time on my Farsi in Samarkand, the ancient capital of Uzbekistan, home to
a succession of conquerers from Alexander the Great to Tamerlane.

    A couple of days after he’d signed my travel orders, McGaffin cornered
me in the hall. “They speak Farsi in Samarkand?” he asked. I wasn’t sure, but I’d read
somewhere they did in the fourteenth century. If then, why not now? Things don’t change
overnight north of the Amu Darya. McGaffin let it pass.