Sleeping With The Devil (5 page)

    Still, there had always been exceptions, borders that even the Yuris of
the world couldn’t violate. Listening to him now, I wondered if that was still the case.

    Facts in the arms business aren’t easy to come by. Arms dealers run a
closed shop. They don’t talk to journalists or researchers, put out a trade journal, or
register with the chamber of commerce. To find out what’s going on, you almost have to enlist
an arms dealer - recruit him as an agent to take a look where you can’t. During the first half
of my career, the CIA put a high premium on such assets. Sniffing down the trail of Semtex,
SA-7 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and Kalashnikovs was part of the job, just as
following the money had been for the Watergate investigators. No longer.

    That attitude changed completely in the 1990s, when the CIA’s Office of
General Counsel started to put in overtime worrying about arms dealers “graymailing” the
agency. A mild form of blackmail, graymail works like this: An arms dealer will volunteer his
services to the CIA, claiming he’s a patriot who wants to run out the bad guys in the business.
He provides a couple of tantalizing tidbits about some deal or another, but they end up being
dead ends because the arms dealer is really after an insurance policy. He’s counting on using
the CIA as an umbrella that will cover him for anything he does, legal or illegal. If one day
he’s unfortunate enough to get caught selling arms to an embargoed country like Syria or Iran,
he can falsely claim that his CIA handler (someone like me) had given him a go-ahead. Since CIA
officers undercover cannot testify in court, the arms dealer walks.

    Was it a legitimate worry? Sure. Arms dealers don’t go into the
business because they’re patriots. But intelligence gathering is like investing in the market:
You can stick your neck out and take your losses with your gains. Or you can clip T-bill
coupons with the AARP bluehairs, clearly Langley’s preference.

    To give you an idea of how crazy it got, not too long before I resigned
from the CIA in December 1997, I had the opportunity to recruit an arms dealer who, like Yuri,
sold Russian weaponry in the Middle East. It was at a time when the CIA was beginning to
understand what a disaster the old Soviet strategic-weapons labs and testing facilities were.
Stocks were missing everywhere. During a routine visit to a former Soviet weapons site called
Vozrozhdeniye, on an island in the Aral Sea, we found weaponized anthrax lying on the ground.
Anthrax! The site was unguarded, and anyone could have picked it up. That’s the kind of thing I
wanted to turn this arms dealer loose on.

    Times were hard in the arms trade. Supply and demand had gotten out of
whack. My guy was happy simply to have the CIA pay his travel and expenses. He would do his
business on the side - legitimate, he assured me - while giving me a heads-up when things like
anthrax were being put on the market. I thought this operation would be fairly clear-cut, and
inexpensive, too, but as soon as my bosses heard what I intended to do, the hand wringing
started. At first they flatly refused to let me meet the guy. They relented only when I agreed
to drag along a lawyer from the general counsel’s office.

    You can imagine the chill that put on the operation. Informants, by
nature, work in the dark. Turn a government lawyer’s spotlight on them, and they scurry back to
their rat holes. The seventh floor at Langley had its priorities, though. If the guy tried to
play us, the CIA brass wanted to be able to produce the lawyer in court. No one seemed to care
that, in the end, we wouldn’t learn a damn thing about the anthrax at Vozrozhdeniye or any of
the other stuff missing from the ex-Soviet strategic-weapons sites. After I resigned, I heard
that the informant was dropped - terminated, as it’s called in the business - and the CIA went
back to treating arms dealers like the clap, closing the best window we had into the
international arms market and the deadly scourge of proliferation.

    In Caesarea, face-to-face with a true titan of the arms trade, I wasn’t
about to let another opportunity slip by. More than anything else, I wanted to hear what Yuri
could tell me about Saudi Arabia and arms.

    By 2001 anyone who understood anything about Saudi Arabia knew it was
circling the drain. Per capita income over the last twenty years had fallen by more than 60
percent. Birth rates had soared to among the highest in the world. Meanwhile, the royal
family’s grotesque corruption and thousand-and-one-nights lifestyle had started to take a real
toll on the Saudi street. Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia were openly calling for a
jihad against the West - a metaphor, I assure you, that includes the royal family. Signs were
mounting that the place was beginning to crack wide open. In 1995 the National Guard barracks
was bombed, killing five Americans. Under a year later, a second terrorist attack on a U.S.
military barracks in al-Khobar killed nineteen U.S. servicemen. In 2000 two Saudi security
officers hijacked a Saudi commercial jet bound for London and forced it to land in Baghdad. “We
are just ordinary people, and we are calling for the rights of the Saudi people, such as decent
education, decent health, and other services,” one of the hijackers told officials when the
plane put down in Iraq.

    What I didn’t know and was trying to angle Yuri into telling me was
whether anyone had the ability to translate all this discontent into activity, like
overthrowing the Al Sa’ud, the semisedentary, unworldly Bedouin clan that traces its lineage
back to the eighteenth century. To do that, they would need arms, and a lot of them.

    The Saudi government probably spends more per capita than any other
country in the world on arms. (It acknowledges only that it spends 13 percent of its gross
domestic product, but half of its revenue is earmarked for the military.) That’s basically
without having to provide for its own external defense; U.S. carrier groups and F-15 combat air
patrols over the Gulf take care of that. (And the U.S. still manages to spend less than 4
percent of GDP on the military.) Also, Saudi Arabia has never fought in any Arab-Israeli war,
from 1948 until today. In fact, the Al Sa’ud’s military hasn’t fought a war since the 1930s. To
understand the significance of its spending on arms, look at the French for comparison.
Although France has a modern, combat-ready mobile army that fights in a handful of African bush
wars and participates in peace missions all over the world, it spends only 2.57 percent of GDP
on its military.

    So where does Saudi Arabia’s defense money go? A lot disappears down
the depths of corruption, but an equal amount goes for personal protection of the royal family.
The Saudi National Guard, as well equipped as the best army in the world and as well paid, is
probably the most expensive bodyguard service in the world. Every time you fill up your car
with gas that has its beginning as Saudi crude - and statistically, that should be about one in
every five or six times you pull up to the pump - you’re contributing something like a dollar
toward keeping Saudi royal heads attached to their necks.

    Over the years I served in the Middle East, I always accepted on faith
my government’s comfortable assumption that with all the money the Al Sa’ud have dumped into
arming their bodyguards, they could keep themselves (and our oil) safe, including preventing
average Saudis from acquiring heavy weapons, the kind they would need to unseat the regime. Now
I was beginning to have my doubts.

    Yuri probably knew as much about dirty arms trading as any man alive.
But why should I expect him to give me a quick refresher course? If he’d wanted to teach, he
would have stayed in Moscow and found a job at a school. I’d have to convince him that he stood
to make some money. Since I wasn’t in the arms business, I’d need to invent some story, weave
it out of whole cloth. Involvement may be the first step to understanding, but to become
involved, you sometimes have to be “creative” with the facts.

    “New subject, Yuri,” I started tentatively. “I need some small stuff,
you know, plastic explosives, rocket launchers, rifles.”

    Yuri’s eyes flickered. The “stuff” I was talking about had made him a
fortune in West Africa. He couldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

    Before he could answer, I lowered my voice and went on: “I need it
delivered inside Saudi Arabia.”

    Yuri waited for what seemed like an hour before answering. He was
sitting across the table from an ex-CIA officer whom he had just met. He must have figured he’d
already given away too much about his business. Was I still working for the agency? Had I come
to the Israeli Riviera to drag him into some dirty game and entrap him?

    “I myself won’t touch it,” Yuri said at last with a zippered smile.
“But if you’re serious, I’ll give you the number of an associate in Moscow. He’s done it
before.”

    “Done what before?”

    “Delivered weapons inside Saudi Arabia. Like Domino’s, he delivers
anywhere, anytime. Even to the crazy Vahabis.”

    “Vahabis” is the way Russians end up pronouncing “Wahhabis.”

    “You’re talking about pistols, rifles, ammunition?” I asked.

    “Yes, and the big stuff, too. You got the cash, he’s got the hardware.”

    I shouldn’t have been surprised. Six months later, someone would kill
five people in the United States with weaponized anthrax, the same stuff left lying on the
ground at Vozrozhdeniye, but this time in a form so sophisticated, it would take a Department
of Defense lab something like five years to replicate. As I write this, a shipment of
dismantled Scud missiles was recently discovered hidden on an unflagged North Korean freighter
headed for Sana’, the Yemeni capital. Were the missiles - probably manufactured in North Korea
- meant for Yemen, a U.S. ally in the eerie calculus of the Arab world? Were they intended for
overland shipment to Iraq, which Yemen supported in the last Gulf War? Or were they a
private-placement purchase, using Yemen as a port of convenience? Maybe for some militant
splinter group, say, with its own launcher buried in the Arabian desert? All allies are of
convenience in the Middle East, and it was, after all, Yemeni nationals who helped bin Laden
blow a hole the size of a semi through the armored hull of the U.S.S.
Cole
. Chances are
we’ll never know the whole truth. Maybe even Yuri couldn’t ferret it out. But in the meantime,
any of those possibilities seems as likely to me as any other. You want the big stuff these
days, you can get it delivered right to your door, or theirs.

    

    

    I NEVER CALLED Yuri’s contact in Moscow, and I’ll probably never find
out for sure whether his network actually could deliver arms inside Saudi Arabia. But my gut
tells me he could. And if not him, then someone else.

    Anyhow, I’d already suspected Russian arms dealers were operating
inside the kingdom’s borders. They probably had been since the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991. In the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden’s main supply sergeant was Victor Bout, a former
Russian military officer who had served in Angola, where he got involved in arms trafficking
and oil. Like Yuri’s associate, Bout had a reputation for delivering anything, anywhere,
including the nasty stuff. Through a company called Air Cess, which owns one of the largest
privately owned jet-transport fleets in the world, Bout works the toughest markets - Iran,
Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and Serbia - taking advantage of out-of-the-way airports
like Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, and Burgas, Bulgaria. The word was that for the
right price, he could find you anything, maybe even a nuke delivered to downtown Riyadh.
Although Bout’s connections to bin Laden were exposed in the press, he continues to operate out
of Dubai, Saudi Arabia’s main depot for contraband and shady financial transactions. Dubai is
where most of the money for the September 11 attacks was banked.

    Bout is mostly bullet-proof because the Russian external intelligence
service (the SVR) is part owner of Air Cess. What’s more, Russian arms trafficking has become
almost a legitimate business: Saudi defense minster Sultan bin ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz tried to get into
it. Sultan even hosted a visit to Saudi Arabia by the head Rosvoorouzhenie, Russia’s state arms
marketer.

    I also didn’t need Yuri to tell me that the kingdom’s 4,431-kilometer
land border and 2,640-kilometer shoreline are indefensible. Since before recorded history,
Bedouin nomads and smugglers have wandered freely back and forth across the Arabian peninsula,
unchecked and uncontrolled. Gold smugglers from India still sail up the Gulf and clandestinely
unload their shipments every night. And we already knew Yuri’s crazy Vahabis could get their
hands on weapons. They did just fine arming themselves in 1979, when they stormed the Mecca’s
Great Mosque.

    Loose arms and open borders are never a good sign, but they don’t
necessarily mean that a country is about to slip into a civil war or go under. What you need to
bring down a regime like the Al Sa’ud is a readiness of its citizens to pick up those arms and
use them, to fight and die for their beliefs, in this instance against a heavily armed,
well-paid, and very extensive palace guard. Up until September 11, a lot of Middle East
watchers, me included, didn’t think the average Saudi fit that description. We all had
hardwired in our brains the stereotype of young, oil-rich brats screaming at their Filipino
servants to take the wrappers off their candy. Fighting and dying for anything as abstract as a
belief seemed beyond their range of probable actions.

    September 11 undid that stereotype for me. The fifteen Saudi hijackers
were all the proof I need that the kingdom has a reservoir of young men who won’t flinch when
faced with death, whether that entails flying planes into skyscrapers or blasting away at the
Al Sa’ud or Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure with heavy weapons. Militant Islam has energized
young Saudis like we never thought possible.