The Circuit (27 page)

Obviously the Saudi authorities didn’t want journalists getting too close so I had to work quickly. I managed to reach the edge of the inner cordon; the police were firing sporadically into a wide area. The shooting was very indiscriminate and far too dangerous to observe up close, so I decided to keep myself and the crew behind the two cordons.

After a while our government minder caught up with us. Rather than send us back to our hotel, he very kindly got permission for CNN to film the outer cordon police checkpoints. He even arranged for Nic to interview a Police Commander. Nic did live shots through the night, updating the story with each new detail coming out of the Saudi Interior Ministry. The next morning, while the majority of the press stationed at our hotel was waking to news of a shoot-out at an al-Qaeda safe house in Riyadh, Nic was putting the story to bed: two suspected militants were killed in the battle and three wounded; one of the militants blew himself up at the gates of the house in an apparent suicide attack on police. The police recovered a cache of weapons from the house including surface-to-air missiles, RPGs, automatic rifles, grenades, ammo and explosive materials. They also made a grisly discovery in the refrigerator: the head of Paul Johnson, the US engineer who’d been captured and killed by al-Qaeda operatives a month earlier.

Two days after the shoot-out, CNN was granted exclusive permission to interview the Riyadh Police Chief outside the captured safe house. Aside from removing the bodies, the authorities had done little to tidy up before we got there. The building was pocked with bullet holes and blood was smeared on the steps leading up to the front door and on the door itself. Clothing, beds and other furniture were stacked in the courtyard outside. The most disturbing sight was the front gate of the house; a metal door with plastic sheeting that had melted from the heat generated by the blast of the suicide bomber.

While we were filming, residents who’d evacuated the neighbourhood during the battle were returning home. The people were as modest as their houses; middle class and unassuming, a side of Saudi Arabia few outsiders see. Judging from the state of their neighbourhood, the residents had had good reason to flee. The courtyard walls bordering the street and a school building at the end of it were all peppered with bullet holes.

I spoke with some of the residents to see what they could tell me about the incident. One man who lived next door to the safe house said he’d hidden under furniture with his three-year-old daughter for eleven hours, until he was sure that the fighting had stopped.

At the end of the battle-scarred street was a sight common in the Saudi capital: a plastic yellow rubbish bin with the words ‘Riyadh the Clean City’ written in Arabic and English. Two little boys both under the age of eight were playing near the bin. I asked who they were. They told me they were brothers and pointed to their home; it was four doors down from the al-Qaeda safe house. I photographed them in front of their school at the end of the street. The boys appeared traumatized standing in front of the bullet-riddled building. The location could easily have been mistaken for Baghdad.

CHAPTER 26

My work on The Circuit has put me face to face with some notorious rogues. I always find these encounters remarkable. Meeting infamous figures in the flesh, listening to them being interviewed uncut and unedited, is fascinating. Western governments have a bad habit of personalizing the War on Terror by reducing it to a series of Most Wanted posters. But I’ve learned over the years that terrorist organizations don’t rest on the shoulders of individuals. Take Osama bin Laden out of the equation and al-Qaeda still exists.

By summer 2004, my rogues’ gallery included the likes of Yasir Arafat and Sheikh Yassin. Thanks to Nic, I was poised to add a few new faces. Nic wanted to include two so-called ‘reformed’ Islamic radicals in his documentary on Saudi Arabia. One of the interviewees, a young Saudi who’d been jailed for his beliefs, reformed and released, had been lined up and approved by the minder. The other character Nic wanted to interview would have to be pursued through less overt channels.

If the name Mohammed Jamal Khalifa doesn’t ring a bell, his brother-in-law’s may – Osama bin Laden. For over a decade, Khalifa lived and worked side by side with bin Laden. The two met at university in 1976. During the 1980s, they joined other jihadists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation. In 1986, according to Khalifa, the fast friends went their separate ways. Khalifa claimed he fell out with bin Laden over the formation of al-Qaeda. After the 11 September attacks, Khalifa publicly denied having ever been an active member of the organization.

The CIA disagreed. They believed Khalifa had worked as al-Qaeda’s money man in the Philippines, setting up front companies to finance operations for the terror group Abu Sayyaf. Throughout the early 1990s, Khalifa did leave quite an incriminating trail. His business cards were found in apartments rented to Ramzi Yousseff, the convicted ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1994 Khalifa was detained in California by FBI officials. Bomb-making manuals written in Arabic were among his personal belongings.

Khalifa maintained his innocence throughout, claiming that the companies he started were legitimate Islamic charities. The only time he was jailed was in Saudi Arabia shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks. After his release, he was barred from leaving the country for several years. He went on to publicly denounce al-Qaeda.

After prison, Khalifa all but disappeared from public view. He opened a fish restaurant outside the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah and rarely gave interviews. His low profile suited the Saudi authorities. Given his background, Khalifa was hardly an ideal poster child for Saudi Arabia’s reformed radicals. Requesting an interview with him through the minder was a non-starter. If Nic wanted to get Khalifa on camera, he’d have to do it on the sly.

A few days after the shoot-out at the al-Qaeda safe house in Riyadh, I accompanied Nic and his crew to Jeddah to film some additional pre-approved elements for the documentary. The trip involved switching minders; the one in Riyadh saw us off at the airport and another met us off the plane in Jeddah. The Jeddah minder wasn’t nearly as vigilant as his counterpart in Riyadh. He drove us to our hotel, dropped us off and said he’d be back in the morning. It was a golden opportunity. As soon as the minder left, the young CNN producer with the great contacts was on the phone; the interview with Khalifa was Nic’s if he wanted it.

The interview was to take place that same night at Khalifa’s restaurant approximately an hour’s drive from Jeddah. The timing was great from a security standpoint. Driving at night would make it much harder for people on the roads to see into our vehicles and identify us as westerners.

Khalifa’s restaurant was full of diners when we arrived. A short and stocky young man introducing himself as Khalifa’s son met us at the entrance. He escorted us to a private room in the back and told us his father would be in shortly.

I was very excited by the prospect of meeting Khalifa face to face. I couldn’t believe he’d got away with so much. I wondered whether the real man would live up to the infamous image.

Khalifa arrived and greeted us cordially. Like Arafat, he was much smaller in person than I’d imagined. He looked and acted as though he came from a privileged background. His mannerisms were as polished as his neatly trimmed facial hair. But for all his refinement, I could tell the man was hard as nails. Khalifa was no ponce. He reminded me of a gangster, albeit one in a long, white man-dress.

Nic lost no time diving into the interview. It was absorbing from start to finish. Many of Nic’s questions focused on Khalifa’s impressions of bin Laden. The answers confirmed my beliefs about the role of individuals in terrorist organizations. Khalifa described bin Laden as a charismatic individual who easily won over people. ‘Many people really love Osama,’ he said. Far from a terrorist mastermind, Khalifa claimed bin Laden ‘cannot organize anything’, and that during the years they lived together it was Khalifa, not bin Laden, who arranged everything from prayer times to picnics. Off camera, Khalifa commented that the al-Qaeda leader was nothing more than a figurehead. As he put it, the west had turned bin Laden into ‘the Nike stripe’ of terrorism.

In addition to bin Laden, Nic pressed Khalifa over allegations about his involvement in al-Qaeda. Khalifa said he was ‘very confident’ that the allegations couldn’t be proven. To this day I wonder what made him so self-assured because he looked to me to be guilty as hell. To underscore his innocence, Khalifa threw in a personal appeal to bin Laden. ‘Please come out,’ he said to the camera. ‘Tell those people to stop. You are the one who can tell that, and you are the one who can stop it.’ Cagey character.

After the interview Khalifa invited us to dine in one of the restaurant’s private rooms. The fish was out of this world. Perhaps if he’d stuck with the restaurant business Khalifa would have got away with his wicked past. In 2007, however, it caught up with him. Khalifa died in a violent attack on a gem mine he owned in Madagascar. According to published reports, some twenty-odd men stormed Khalifa’s guest house; he was shot twice, stabbed and hacked with an axe. When I read about it, I wondered whether it was simply a case of a business deal gone bad, a revenge attack by al-Qaeda, or perhaps even the CIA.

Back in Riyadh, Nic caught up with the other reformed radical he wanted to interview, a young man by the name of Abdullah al Otaibi. Abdullah had spent ten years in a Saudi jail for his radical Islamic thinking. Middle class and sheltered, his background had little in common with that of the worldly, wealthy Khalifa. Yet both men were seduced by extremist ideas.

Abdullah gave his interview to CNN in Arabic. More than once, he openly criticized Saudi clerics whom he blamed for pushing moderate Muslims like himself towards extremism. It all sounded a bit too rehearsed in my view. If the Saudis could convince the world that al-Qaeda had come about solely because of extremist interpretations of the Koran, then all they had to do was root out the bad clerics and problem solved. If only it were that easy. During his interview, Abdullah mentioned that during his radical years he’d lived with a group of fellow jihadists in Suweidi, the al-Qaeda neighbourhood where the BBC crew had been attacked. Nic was very keen to film Abdullah in his old stomping ground and to record a stand-up where the BBC incident had taken place.

As much as I wanted to accommodate Nic, filming in Suweidi presented a huge security problem. Nic and I usually get on very well. But we can have strong words when he wants to achieve something which I view as too dangerous. This was one of those occasions. Nic insisted he needed the Suweidi elements for his documentary. I appreciated his desire to be thorough with his reporting, but there was absolutely no way I was going to stand back and allow the crew to film on streets crawling with al-Qaeda. For a while, we were at loggerheads on how to proceed.

After mulling it over, I presented Nic with a compromise. I proposed that rather than have the whole crew go charging into Suweidi cold, Abdullah and I first recce the neighbourhood by car. If Abdullah were driving, I could film him with a hand-held DV camera talking about his old house and other relevant landmarks as we drove past them. I could also covertly film the area where the BBC crew had been ambushed. If I determined afterwards that it was too dangerous for the crew to go, at the very least, Nic would have b-roll for his story.

Fortunately, Nic agreed with the plan. I promised him that if there was any way for him to film inside Suweidi safely, I’d make it happen. Much to my surprise, the minder was also in favour of Abdullah and me going to Suweidi alone. Frankly, I was happy to leave him behind. Our minder had been helpful but I still didn’t trust him.

The next morning, following a quick brief, Abdullah and I were off. As we drove, I thought about what to ask him on camera once we got to Suweidi. There were so many questions he’d avoided when Nic interviewed him. Abdullah wouldn’t say, for example, why extremist ideas had appealed to him in the first place. He didn’t criticize the Saudi royal family, nor did he express any frustration with living in a monarchy that barred people like him from having a voice in politics. The most Abdullah offered were vague references about how he’d been convinced that being religious was ‘better’ for him.

By that point, however, I didn’t need an explanation from Abdullah. The fifteen-minute drive from our hotel to the edge of Suweidi illustrated perfectly why so many young Saudi men were embracing jihadist ideals. The centre of the Saudi capital is a collection of beautiful skyscrapers and air-conditioned shopping malls housing every luxury under the sun. It’s the epicentre of the country’s ‘haves’. Push out from the centre of Riyadh and you see how many ‘have-nots’ populate the Kingdom. There are middle-class neighbourhoods, nondescript, modest places like the King Fahd district where the shoot-out at the al-Qaeda safe house took place. Go a little further and you find neighbourhoods like Suweidi, areas which by Saudi standards are deprived.

I knew from my previous work on The Circuit that not all Gulf Arabs were obscenely wealthy. I didn’t realize, however, what a huge middle class existed in Saudi Arabia. The country is full of young men like Abdullah who could never afford a private jet, let alone two. I imagined even elite Saudis like Khalifa must have felt inadequate compared to the likes of Prince Al Waleed bin Talal.

While we were driving, Abdullah started chatting with me – in English. I was somewhat taken back because I’d assumed when he gave his interview in Arabic that his English was limited. In fact, it was quite good. For instance, he asked me where I was from.

‘Scotland,’ I said.

‘Braveheart!’ he exclaimed. ‘You know what it’s like to be oppressed.’

It was obvious he was drawing a parallel with his own experience. That comment convinced me that it wasn’t religion that had driven Abdullah, and others like him, towards extremism. It was resentment and anger; resentment toward a royal family that hoarded and squandered the country’s wealth and anger toward the western nations that enabled them to get away with it.