Sleeping With The Devil (25 page)

    “I don’t have a clue,” he said. “Saudi Arabia is not a target. And I
haven’t been to the Fergana.”

    He had the same problem I’d had in Beirut when I was cultivating my
Muslim Brother Zuhayr Shawish. Without a directive from Langley to look into Saudi
fundamentalism in Central Asia, a CIA chief wasn’t even supposed to think about it.

    “I could ask the Uzbeks,” he continued, “but I already know they
wouldn’t tell me a damn thing. They’d say it was an internal matter, and that would be that.”

    As for the Uzbeks, I got the distinct impression that they treated
militant Islamic fundamentalists the same way the Soviet commissars had treated the
basmachi
revolt: dismissing them as bands of criminals.

    I spent a week in Tashkent living in the embassy community. Right away
I noticed that survival was on everyone’s mind. The housing was lousy. The plumbing never
worked. There was always a shortage of gasoline. If there was any time left at the end of the
day, the embassy staff was always saddled with some Washington project, like setting up the
Peace Corps or teaching the Uzbeks how to operate voting machines, never mind that there hadn’t
ever been a democratic election in Uzbekistan. In the meantime, no one had any idea what the
IIRO and Saudi Arabia were up to in Central Asia.

    I NEVER MADE IT to Samarkand to study Farsi. The CIA reopened the
Dushanbe office in January 1993, and I was back in business. It wasn’t long before the subject
of Saudi Arabia raised its head like a maniacal jack-in-the-box.

    About three a.m. I heard someone pounding on my door. I couldn’t
imagine who it was. To get to my office/bedroom, which was permanently lodged in the
Oktoberskaya Hotel along with the Russian and Iranian embassies, you had to pass two heavily
armed Tajik guards in the lobby. And once you got to the third floor, you were met by a platoon
of Russian
spetznatz
, or special forces.

    I opened the door to find myself nose-to-nose with the dough-faced
local Russian chief intelligence chief. Boris Sergeivich, as I will call him, was stumbling
drunk.

    
“Yop tavaya mat!”
he yelled, spittle flying. In Russian, it
means “Go fuck your mother.”

    When I got Boris quieted down, he explained to me why he was so pissy.
Earlier that evening, a Tajik Islamic rebel group had crossed the Panj River from Afghanistan
and managed to overrun a Russian border post and cut off all the guards’ heads.

    “It was your tit-sucking Saudi Arabia.” Boris’s anger had returned.
“The goddamn war is over. Tell them to leave us alone.”

    I couldn’t figure out what Saudi Arabia had to do with the attack. It
didn’t have any troops in Afghanistan, at least officially, and the part of Afghanistan the
rebels had crossed from was controlled by a group we assumed took orders from Tehran.

    Boris said I was wrong. The rebels were under the command of Rasool
Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami, bin Laden’s Afghani protector.

    I didn’t believe that. The Russians seemed to blame everything on Saudi
Arabia, from the war in Afghanistan to ethnic fighting between Armenians and Azeris in
Azerbaijan. They also accused the Saudis of stoking the Chechen separatists who declared their
independence in 1991. Saudi Arabia may have paid for the Afghan war, but that didn’t mean it
was doing the same thing in Central Asia. Saudi Arabia was our ally; it would have told us if
it was conducting a covert campaign in Tajikistan. Naive me.

    I played along with Boris. I told him I’d help him find out what Sayyaf
was doing, or whether Riyadh had anything to do with the attack. He said something under his
breath about trusting the CIA when hell froze over. I pushed him out the door with a bottle of
Black Label scotch in each hand.

    Two days later, Boris knocked on my door again. He handed me a neatly
typed list of names. “You will know who these bastards are,” he said. “They’re Arabs, and
they’re all with Sayyaf. They were behind the attack on our border post.”

    I didn’t bother sending the names to headquarters because I wasn’t
supposed to be coordinating with the Russians. Instead, I sent the names to Islamabad, where
Beirut Bill [text omitted] was now chief. Bill, I thought, would understand what I was trying
to do. And if any place would know about the fundamentalists, it was Islamabad. After all, that
was where the Afghan war was run from. Another two days later, Bill sent his reply: He couldn’t
find anything about Boris’s Arabs because we didn’t have any agents in Sayyaf’s camp.

    It was hard to believe. Sayyaf was our creation. We’d helped him set up
in Peshawar. He was one of the Peshawar Seven, the original Afghan resistance groups backed by
the National Security Council’s Special Coordination Committee. Good enough, but you learn in
Espionage 101 never to get involved in covert action unless you know for certain what your
surrogates are doing. To know that, you need a source in the group. Obviously we didn’t have a
source in Sayyaf’s group, or one who lasted through the Afghan conflict. From a spy’s
perspective, it was a fatal mistake.

    Boris, for one, would have found this incomprehensible. The Soviets
never ran a covert campaign unless they controlled it from A to Z. If they asked the East
Germans to run a campaign in Africa or South America, they made damn sure they knew what was
going on. They never would have trusted the Pakistanis or Saudis to tell the truth.

    I avoided Boris for the next few weeks. When I couldn’t help passing
him in the dim corridor we shared, he smirked as if to say:
See, I told you so
. I’m sure
he was convinced we knew what Sayyaf, his master, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the
fundamentalists in Afghanistan were up to. I would have been embarrassed for myself and my
country had he learned otherwise.

    The attacks on Russian troops along the Tajik border continued until I
was transferred out of Dushanbe in 1994, but Boris would never again ask me to trace any names.

    THINGS WOULDN’T GET any better. In 1997 Bill Lofgren, the chief of the
Central Eurasian Division, which covered the former Soviet Union and East Europe, had borrowed
the director’s Gulfstream to take a quick tour of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Six stops and
God knows how many gallons of vodka later, we still didn’t have the answer we had come for: Was
militant Islam a threat to the Caspian Sea region or not? No one would say a word about it,
even the most senior officials who were presumably authorized to talk about it. It was the same
sort of thing as Washington and Saudi Arabia - a consent of silence.

    The telling part of the trip came on the return. The morning we were
getting ready to fly back to London from Alma-Ata, the pilot filed a flight plan to Tbilisi,
Georgia. No problem with that - at first. We were told we could refuel and spend the day
touring Tbilisi if we wanted. But as soon as the plane landed, we knew things were going wrong.
A gun-toting soldier appeared at the Gulfstream’s door and yelled at us to close it back up and
stay in the plane. Thirty minutes later, a man in a dirty jumpsuit appeared. He carried a
bucket in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He proceeded to paint a circle around the
Gulfstream. As soon as he connected the ends, the border guard with the assault rifle
reappeared. “You can get out now, but don’t step outside the circle.” An hour later, we were
fueled up and on our way to London, missing out on our last chance to find out about the
Islamic-fundamentalist threat. Ironically, our flight path took us over Georgia’s Pankisi
Valley, a bin Laden stronghold.

    I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND how right Boris had been until 1998, when I came
across some Russian documents related to the Chechen war.

    Chechnya declared its independence from Russia back in 1991, but it
wasn’t until 1994 that Russian president Boris Yeltsin moved to bring the wayward child back
into the Russian fold. I watched clips of Russian armor and artillery flattening Grozny. I read
everything I could about the conflict, but the reporting was sparse. True to form, the CIA
didn’t have a single source among the Chechen rebels. Other countries in the region, like
Georgia and Azerbaijan, claimed to have no idea who was paying for and arming the Chechen
rebels. The conflict seemed to go on forever. It had to be costing hundreds of millions of
dollars.

    After I left the CIA I found my answer in a batch of Russian
intelligence reports that drew a convincingly direct link between the Saudi government and the
Chechen rebels. It was not a question of Saudi charity money finding its way to the Chechens.
One report described how on June 22, 1998, forty Chechens were quietly brought to a secret
military camp located seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh. Over the next four months, they
were trained in explosives, hand-to-hand combat, and small weapons. A lot of time was set aside
for indoctrination into Wahhabi Islam. Salman, the governor of Riyadh and the full brother of
King Fahd, was the camp’s sponsor.

    If the reports were accurate, Saudi Arabia’s critics had it wrong. The
country wasn’t just committing sins of omission where the extremists and their jihads were
concerned. Boris had been right to be so angry - the Saudis were directly sponsoring terrorism.
But why?

    

    

    

    

    FOR AMERICAN ARMS MAKERS, Saudi Arabia is an industry subsector all its
own, with its own peculiar rules. We buy oil from Saudi Arabia, refine it, and put it in our
automobiles, and a certain small percentage of what we pay for it ends up funding terrorist
acts against America and American institutions at home and abroad. With the money it earns from
oil sales, the Saudi royal family purchases arms from us to protect itself from within and
without, but mostly from within. We sell the Saudis those arms knowing that X amount of the
purchase price will go to cover the astronomical “commissions” paid to the very few Saudis who
control the arms industry, and of that X amount, a smaller Y amount will go to funding
Saudi-based groups that intend to do harm to the West, because otherwise, those same groups
might do harm back home in the sunny suburbs of, say, Riyadh.

    It all sounds a little nuts. But buying armaments not only helps to
protect the Al Sa’ud from its own subjects; it’s also the easiest way for rapacious Saudi
princes to siphon money out of the national treasury. The financial transactions of Saudi
Aramco, the national oil company, are still run by Westerners and too transparent to cheat on.
That leaves two subsidiary industries, armaments and construction, as the greatest targets of
opportunity, and the Bakr bin Laden family gets the lion’s share of the graft in the latter.
From the U.S. point of view, selling Saudi Arabia its armaments is also the simplest way to
make sure that our oil expenditures return to the United States in the form of defense-industry
revenues. If that means having to hold our noses at the stink of corruption, well, that’s just
realpolitik.