Sleeping With The Devil (31 page)

    At their meeting on September 23, 1996, ‘Abdallah explained to Murphy
that the United States needed to consult with Saudi Arabia before taking any new initiatives in
the region. ‘Abdallah brought up the Gulf War. The Bush administration, he said, had misled
Saudi Arabia about the costs. Helping to pay for the U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia was costing
additional billions. (In other words, Saudi Arabia couldn’t afford the Boeings or any other
expensive toys.) Moving on to regional problems, ‘Abdallah said that the Clinton administration
had to get rid of Saddam right away - or never. At the same time, the Arabs could not be
allowed to believe the U.S. was waging a war against the Iraqi people. Finally, the United
States must come to a modus vivendi with Tehran. It was simply costing the Arabs too much to be
in a constant state of conflict with Iran.

    Needless to say, ‘Abdallah’s plea fell on deaf ears back in Washington.
Clinton was running for a second term. All the White House cared about was that Saudi checks
kept arriving in Seattle and that no one was laid off from Boeing’s assembly lines.

    Meanwhile, Prince Sultan continued to buy guns that no one could
afford. In December 1996 Saudi Arabia went ahead with another costly, useless arms deal,
picking up forty-four model-412 Augusta helicopters that could be financed by Yamama oil, which
meant even more grotesque commissions could be hidden from the Saudi street. A month later,
Sultan was back in the marketplace, pricing 102 F-16 multirole combat aircraft. Later that
year, the Saudis committed to a $3 billion frigate deal with France. Never mind that on the
Yamama front alone, the kingdom was now $4.5 billion in arrears.

    The real kicker came on December 18, 1996, when Secretary of Defense
William Perry, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Vice President Al Gore summoned
Bandar to the White House. It wasn’t to inquire about the progress of the Khobar investigation.
They weren’t going to let Bandar go home to his Potomac estate until he agreed to give Bosnia
$2 million a month in aid.

    THE MORE the Clinton White House saw of ‘Abdallah, the less they liked
him. He was not only threatening to cut back defense and civilian aviation contracts but also
demonstrating a definite independent streak on foreign policy.

    He kept harping on the message he had delivered to Richard Murphy:
Either overthrow Saddam Hussein, or leave him alone and lift the sanctions. Clinton’s
do-nothing policy on Iraq - keeping Saddam in his box, or “containment,” as the White House
euphemistically referred to it - was costing the United States and Saudi Arabia a lot of money,
as well as what little goodwill was left in the Middle East. The average Saudi was starting to
side more with Saddam than with the royal family; Islamic militants were becoming commonplace
in the Saudi military. So desperate was ‘Abdallah to take Iraq off the griddle that in June
1997 he sent his own emissaries to meet with Saddam, opening up a back channel the U.S. wasn’t
supposed to know about. The effort didn’t go anywhere, but it did add to Washington’s mistrust
of ‘Abdallah.

    The crown prince also irritated Washington when he cut a deal with Iran
and Mexico to raise oil prices. By 1996 oil was averaging just under $21 a barrel. At that
rate, all three countries were heading toward a financial abyss. ‘Abdallah arranged to make a
pilgrimmage to Mecca with the son of former Iranian president Akbar Hashami Rafsanjani. The
details of the pricing were worked out then. The following year, the price of a barrel of oil
rose to $23, a jump of almost 10 percent. Almost no one noticed in the U.S. - the NASDAQ was
going ape - but the White House didn’t at all like the precedent ‘Abdallah had set.

    Most unforgivably for the White House, ‘Abdallah called the 1993 Oslo
accords what they were: a lie. The accords had been sold to the Arabs on the grounds that the
Palestinians would get some sort of workable state in the West Bank and Gaza - United Nations
Resolution 242, more or less. But not a single settlement was dismantled under Oslo. The Jewish
settler population in the West Bank went from 250,000 to 380,000, and 5,000 Jewish settlers in
the Jordan Valley continued to consume 75 percent of the water, leaving the remainder for two
million Palestinians to live on.

    ‘Abdallah knew that numbers like those would only inflame the militants
inside his country, but the Clinton administration - as would the second Bush administration -
blissfully ignored it all. The United States had made a pact with the devil and was going to
stick with it until the catastrophic end. As long as Sultan kept buying American weapons and
Aramco kept banking our oil, no one in Washington cared what was happening in the kingdom.

    

    

    A COUPLE OF MONTHS before I resigned from the CIA, I found myself
wondering if there was anything not for sale in Washington. Although I was always an outsider,
I couldn’t help but notice that the Bandars and the Boeings, the Carlyle Groups and the Exxons
ran Washington. I’d seen the campaign-finance scandal from a front-row seat, noting how a
couple hundred thousand dollars bought you instant access to the president. I’d seen, too, how
some midlevel oil exec could pick up the telephone and get a meeting with the National Security
Council as fast as Bandar could get one with the president. But Washington had to have its
limits, didn’t it? Ironically, I would have to go back to the Middle East to get my answer.

    When I checked out of the CIA on December 4, 1997, I had a lot of
regrets. I was walking away from the place I had spent my adult life. As I headed across the
parking lot one last time, my sole consolation - if you want to call it that - was that the
agency I was leaving wasn’t the one I had joined [text omitted]It had lost touch with much of
the world, especially the place I felt passionate about: the Middle East. Two separate
incidents had convinced me of this.

    In early October 1994, when I was deputy chief of Iraqi operations, I
picked up a rumor from an agent in Amman that Saddam Hussein was moving armor back toward the
Kuwaiti border. Saddam was reportedly sick of the embargo and intended to reinvade Kuwait. I
didn’t believe it. How stupid could he be?

    Sure enough, as soon as I got back to Washington, our satellites picked
up the movement of Iraqi armor south toward the Kuwaiti border. The satellites were fine up to
a point. But what they couldn’t tell us - and what the White House wanted to know - was whether
Saddam intended to actually cross the border. For that we would need a human source. The only
problem was that we didn’t have one. Not only did we not have someone next to Saddam, we didn’t
have a source in his military to tell us, for instance, whether the army was putting in
logistics lines, a sign that Saddam was serious about going all the way.

    My first phone call from the White House situation room came at 0834. A
navy ensign informed me that the president was considering dispatching a carrier to the Gulf
but wanted to hear what the CIA’s directorate of operations had to say before giving the order.
Now the heat was on.

    I knew we didn’t have a source, so it was time to think out of the box.
I took a flier and called up the Saudi desk to see if they’d noticed any usual activity in
Iraq. Bedouin crossed the Iraqi-Saudi border all the time. Maybe one of them had picked up a
rumor. The desk officer said without missing a beat, “There’s nothing at all. Nothing.”

    I knew she was telling me the truth, but it was still hard to believe.
Saudi Arabia was supposed to be our ally. We had troops based in the kingdom. We kept a fleet
in the Gulf and F-15s patrolling it because of the Saudis. Before I could ask if we could send
a message to our good friends in the desert, the desk officer said, “And there’s no point in
asking.[text omitted]

    With Saudi Arabia out, Kuwait was my last chance. I called the chief
there on a secure phone. He and I had known each other since serving together in India in the
late 1970s. He’d arrived in New Delhi wet behind the ears but now was in management, on his way
up.

    “The Kuwaitis don’t have the slightest idea what Saddam’s up to,” he
said. “I can have them call up to the border to see what’s going on.” It was grabbing at
straws, but there was no choice.

    He called me back fifteen minutes later. He said a Kuwaiti border guard
with a pair of binoculars could see an Iraqi tank and its crew. “They’re only digging in,
eating lunch,” the chief said.

    Coincidentally, two minutes later, George Tenet was on the line from
the White House. At the time he was head of intelligence programs at the National Security
Council, responsible for relaying updates on the crisis to the situation room. “What the fuck
is going on in Iraq?” he shouted.

    I passed on the chief’s remarks. Tenet, clearly not satisfied, grunted
and hung up.

    It went on like that all day and the next. I would call Kuwait and stay
on the phone until someone could get ahold of the Kuwaiti border guard with the binoculars. As
I waited, I wondered: Is this what all that money for intelligence is buying us? A pair of
binoculars?

    It was at this point that I started to wonder what else we didn’t know
about the northern Gulf. Fine, Saddam and Iraq were closed off to the world. It was hard to
collect intelligence there. But what about our friends like Kuwait or, better, Saudi Arabia,
the heart that pumped our economic life blood?

    I started reading the reports coming out of Riyadh. There was
essentially nothing. They all had to do with the travel of some congressional delegation,
cultural events, book fairs, all spin, no substance. There was not a word about divisions in
the royal family or their relations with the Wahhabis. If you went by the embassy reporting,
the officers weren’t even meeting the Wahhabi clerics, who seemed to be getting more powerful
than the Al Sa’ud.

    I looked through the databases back to 1986. There wasn’t much you
couldn’t find in the newspapers and academic journals. It was like the Kuwaiti and the
binoculars: When it came to the Gulf, we were blind. If the place were to go up in flames, we
wouldn’t know until it was too late.

    As I headed across the parking lot that day in December 1997, I figured
I could do better on my own, particularly if I was living in the Middle East. In fact, I was
headed to Beirut that afternoon.

    IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to see that the Beirut I landed in wasn’t the
Beirut I’d left in 1988. Then it was a city divided by civil war; now it was one huge,
sprawling construction site. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was in the middle of restoring the old
downtown, calling on the services of the world’s best architects. He had even excavated a part
of the old Roman Beirut. An ultramodern tunnel was being dug under the city to clear up its
notorious traffic. There was a new freeway to the airport. Give the place a few years, and it
would rival Paris and London.

    Still, it was the Middle East, and a lot of open wounds needed to be
sewn up before it could be whole again. On Christmas Eve that year, the taxi driver who took me
from the Muslim west to the Christian east said that it was the first time he’d crossed the
Green Line - that no-man’s-land of the civil war. I’d soon be reminded that things weren’t what
they seemed in the Middle East.

    It started when a friend back in Washington asked me to look into the
Qatar opposition that had taken refuge in Beirut and Damascus. He was interested in a rogue
prince, a very close relation of the current Amir. His name was Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad Al
Thani. I give you the full name because it seems that almost every prince in Qatar has a Hamad
or a Jasim in his name. The foreign minister’s name is Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al Thani. The
Amir’s name is Hamad bin Khalifah. For simplicity, I’ll call the exiled Hamad bin Jasim the
black prince.