Sleeping With The Devil (33 page)

    I DIDN’T CARE about foreign governments putting money into U.S.
elections. But I did care about Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and I already knew about the so-called
Bojinka plot - KSM’s plan to blow up U.S. passenger airlines. I had to take the black prince
seriously. But how could I get the information to the CIA? In spite of what the black prince
thought, once you’re out of the CIA, you’re out.

    I did the only thing I could. I e-mailed a friend still in the CIA and
asked him to pass on my information to the Counter-Terrorist Center. As insecure as that
connection was, I included all the data, including the black prince’s name. If nothing else, I
figured, that should ring a bell. I hoped Washington would send out someone to talk to him and
collect whatever he had locked up in his safe. It couldn’t hurt to hear the guy out.

    My friend wrote back the next week: no interest.

    I was never one to give up, so I called a
New York Times
reporter named Jim Risen. If the black prince’s story checked out - especially the documents -
the
Times
would probably run a story and force someone to pay attention to one of our
allies in the Gulf supporting bin Laden, by this time one of the world’s most lethal
terrorists.

    By the time Risen had enough to pursue the story, I’d moved to New
York. The black prince was still prepared to spill his guts. Unfortunately, just as Risen was
about to get on a plane to go see him, the black prince was kidnapped in Beirut and flown back
to Doha. At this writing, he is locked up in a windowless jail, and his family says he’s being
injected with debilitating drugs. As soon as he disappeared into the black hole that is the
Gulf, hard facts became nearly impossible to get.

    EVEN AFTER THE BLACK PRINCE was gone, I wasn’t done with the story. In
New York I looked up one of his associates. Born in Sri Lanka, the man was now a naturalized
American citizen. He once worked for the Qatari mission in the U.N. but now owned a ski lodge
in Vermont.

    He was worried about talking to me. “It’s been very bad for me and my
family with the government. I don’t want any more trouble.”

    After I convinced him I was a friend of the black prince, he told me
his story. In 1995, when the current Amir overthrew his father, he made the tactical error of
siding with the father and the black prince, which made him the enemy of the foreign minister
and the Amir. One day the foreign minister showed up in New York and told him that he could
either change sides and inform on the black prince, or risk being turned in to American
authorities. “What for?” he asked. “I haven’t broken the law.” The foreign minister answered,
“It doesn’t matter; you’ll soon see.”

    Soon after, the FBI showed up at his Bronx apartment building. Agents
went door-to-door asking the Sri Lankan’s neighbors whether they were aware he was a terrorist.
Separately, agents went to New York University and questioned his children, who were students
there. The grilling took place in a squad car parked in front of a university building so other
students could get a good look. The Sri Lankan’s children were let go, but not before being
humiliated. He and his wife were held at the FBI Manhattan field office for twelve hours before
being released. Surveillance on the Sri Lankan and his wife continued for over a month. Even
their lodge in Vermont was watched.

    There was no way I could put all the pieces together. But it was
obvious to me that the foreign minister had a lot of clout in Washington. The money he put into
lobbying and public-relations firms from 1997 to 1999 - $24,628,799.36, to be exact - bought
him a piece of the U.S. justice system. The money allowed Qatar to stiff the FBI team sent to
Doha in February 1996 to arrest Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. It also harnessed the FBI to intimidate
Qatar’s opposition, maybe even a source of information that could have prevented September 11.
Not bad for a country that lived off of American oil companies.

    Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1998, when I was
living in France, I got a call from a young
Wall Street Journal
reporter named Danny
Pearl. We met in Geneva. With a wiry frame and intense eyes, he was one of the most thorough,
dogged, and honest reporters I’d ever come across. You knew right away he would never give up
on a story. I told him about KSM and Qatar. He listened, took notes, and promised to follow up
on it one day. We saw each other from time to time in Washington. He would bring up the Khalid
Sheikh Muhammad story, but neither of us had anything new to add.

    Two days after September 11, I received this e-mail from Pearl:

    

    Hi, how are things? Did your book come out? I hope you weren’t near the
Pentagon Tuesday.

    Like half the paper, I’m being roped into reporting on bin Laden’s
network… some of the suspects supposedly had UAE passports, and I remember you talking once
about how Fujairah was a hot spot for fundies.

    

    Pearl called me the next day. I reminded him about our talks on KSM and
Qatar. “Worth thinking about,” he replied.

    I have no way of knowing whether Pearl went to Karachi and asked about
Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
The Wall Street Journal
says no, that he was working on the
shoe-bomber case. But I can’t help but be struck by the fact that one of the witnesses in the
Pearl murder trial fingered Khalid Sheikh Muhammad as his murderer.

    THE FINAL CHAPTER came to me indirectly, from a friend in London who
told me that a few days after September 11, Pearl called the foreign ministry in Qatar to ask
whether Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was behind the attacks. I didn’t need to be told that the
Qataris adamantly denied knowing anything about September 11 or KSM. Still, I wonder whether
the Qataris called KSM and told him that Pearl was on his trail. Maybe by the time this book
appears in print, we’ll have that answer from his own mouth. It’s certain that no one in
Washington is going to demand an answer from Qatar, our new best ally in the Gulf.

    But we’re not going to find the answers to a lot of life-and-death
questions until our government gets serious about terrorism and starts demanding the truth from
places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And believe me, there are more questions than answers after
September 11. Another Qatari told me that in the late 1990s, Ayman Zawahari, bin Laden’s
Egyptian Muslim Brother deputy, and a dozen other bin Laden associates were all given refuge in
Qatar - with the knowledge of the government. As for Saudi Arabia, we still don’t have an
answer why Omar Bayyumi showed up in San Diego with hundreds of thousands of dollars and helped
to settle two Saudi hijackers. He is out of the FBI’s reach, living quietly somewhere in Saudi
Arabia.

    I often wonder if the money for Colin Powell’s speech at Tufts
University came from the same Saudi defense ministry account used to pay Omar Bayyumi. Unlikely
but not impossible, considering the nature of Washington’s fifty-year marriage with the
kingdom. But it’s not history that should worry us; it’s truth. Until we start demanding the
truth from Saudi Arabia - and telling ourselves the truth, too - there will be more September
11s and more tragedies like Danny Pearl’s murder. That much you can take to the bank.

    

    

    A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.

    - 
Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606

    

    WASHINGTON’S ANSWER for Saudi Arabia - apart from the mantra that
nothing’s wrong - is the same as its answer for the rest of the Middle East: Democracy will
cure everything. Talk the royal family into ceding at least part of its authority; aid and abet
the reform-minded princes; set up a nice little model parliament; compromise the firebrands
with a Cabinet position or two, a couple of political parties, and some money to grease the
skids; send Jimmy Carter in to monitor the initial election; and in a few generations, Riyadh
will be Ankara, or maybe even Stockholm. The governmental mechanism might not work all that
well, but the people who run the government day to day are, for the most part, committed body,
mind, and spirit to rooting out corruption, rounding up terrorists, and recognizing the right
of the people to self-govern.

    An article in the October 6, 2001,
National Journal
- a reliable
organ of Washington Think - sums up the approach and the problem. Ned Walker, the former U.S.
ambassador to Israel and Egypt and the number two man in the Riyadh embassy in the 1980s, told
the
Journal
: “You don’t get real economic development without democratization. For the
long-term stability of the governments in the region, we should encourage democratization,
which means we have to help them build civil societies in the context of their cultures.”

    Chas W. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was bullishly
reassuring: “Al Qaeda is directed first and foremost at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy.
You can be damn sure that any al Qaeda operative is on the Saudi wanted list and that any
senior operative is high on that list.”

    “Saudi Arabia has fought its own counter-terrorism battles,” added
Anthony Cordesman, late of the Defense Department and now a Middle East expert at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies. “Saudi Arabia is in the process of massive social and
economic change. It’s change that’s led a small minority to turn to violence.”

    You can hear this tune all over Washington, from Foggy Bottom to the
think tanks to the local op-ed pages, even out at the CIA, an organization never much for
social engineering. Democracy will triumph in the desert as it triumphed in America and Europe.
People are people, and we all want the same thing.

    It’s utter nonsense. As far as I can tell, democracy’s proponents are
talking about free and fair elections in Saudi Arabia - one person, one vote; the whole nine
yards. Let’s start by taking a look at the last time there were true democratic elections held
in an Arab country: Algeria in late 1991 and early 1992. When it became clear the
fundamentalists were about to win an overwhelming majority and impose an Islamic constitution,
the army stepped in. The country was immediately plunged into a civil war that killed hundreds
of thousands of people. It’s still going on today.

    Why would we expect Saudi Arabia to be different? According to one poll
conducted in October 2001, 95 percent of educated Saudis between the ages of twenty-five and
forty-one support bin Laden. There’s no reason why we should accept the results as hard facts,
but in the absence of any other information, we pretty much have to. In October 2002 I asked a
leader of the Saudi opposition, Muhammad al-Masari, what he thought. There was no doubt in his
mind that an Islamic government would succeed the Al Sa’ud if the Saudis were allowed to decide
their own political destiny. I couldn’t resist asking al-Masari if either the British or
American governments had asked him what he thought about democracy in Saudi Arabia. “No one
from either government has ever asked me anything,” Masari said.