The Story (16 page)

What would the ruling family do next: open Saudi society still further, or crack down? King Fahd did both, striking a balance between liberals and conservatives. To satisfy the young technocrats, he created a
majlis al shura
, or consultative council, a baby step toward greater public participation and accountability, but hugely important in a country that had tolerated neither. Many Saudis still credit the Gulf War with having introduced “modern” politics in the kingdom.

The king also tried to sever aid to militant Islamic groups that had supported Saddam inside the kingdom and abroad. Two years later, the government announced a ban on collecting money within the kingdom for Muslim causes, then estimated to total at least $1 billion a year, without an Interior Ministry permit. But individual contributions to many radical Islamic groups continued.

To placate the politically indispensable religious establishment, Fahd increased the budget of the
mutawa
—those guardians of moral virtue—by $18 million for “training.” The virtue police returned to public venues to uphold religious rules and strictures.

The war ended only a hundred hours after the ground campaign began, with Iraq's expulsion from Kuwait. Despite the coalition's swift victory and the rapid departure of most foreign forces, many Saudi conservatives remained furious at the king for letting “infidel” American forces “occupy” Saudi soil. One wealthy, young Saudi financier had persisted in using his royal access to try to withdraw the invitation to foreign forces. It was the first time I heard the name Osama bin Laden. The rich, young firebrand was known then mainly for his passionate support of militant Islamic causes, especially the Afghan rebels—some of whom the CIA had armed in America's war against the godless Soviets. Shortly before the Gulf War, Bin Laden had marched into the offices of several princes with maps and flowcharts to demonstrate how the kingdom could defend itself without infidel forces.
¹
The Saudi prince who told me about young Bin Laden's meetings had mocked his presentations.
²

But Saudi intelligence was not amused. After the war, the government revoked Bin Laden's citizenship—a rare action, since the Bin Ladens were a prominent Saudi family. Osama's Yemeni-born father had built palaces and facilities for the king and other Saudi royals. But Saudi security was more concerned about reports that Bin Laden was financing militants intent on targeting ruling Saudis and other Arab royalty. Among his beneficiaries was Muhammad's Army, which had attempted to kill then Prince Abdullah, who is now Jordan's king. Expelled from Riyadh, Bin Laden was reduced to shuttling between London and Khartoum with a passport that Sudan's radical Islamic government had issued him. Over time, his denunciations of America, his country's “master,” and of his native Arabia as a kingdom of “heretics” would grow more vehement.

Warren Hoge, then the debonair editor of the paper's Sunday magazine, ran my article about the war's impact on Saudi Arabia on the cover—a totally black page, save for the golden eyes of a veiled woman shrouded in black. I was thrilled with the space he gave me and the display,
and even happier when Joe Lelyveld named me, a recently minted senior writer, the magazine's staff writer in 1992.

Though I did not know it then, the Gulf War had dramatically improved prospects for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Saudis and Israelis had been targeted by Iraqi Scuds, and Israeli strategists had concluded that air power and technology were more important than territory in winning wars and ensuring security. PLO chief Yasir Arafat, whom I had interviewed many times, realized that he needed a political victory after the collapse of his chief patron, the Soviet Union, and his catastrophic decision to back Saddam in the Gulf War. After the war, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states withheld funds for his PLO and prompted a mass exodus of Palestinian refugees. The Gulf no longer wanted Palestinians who had sided with Saddam. The refugees blamed Arafat for their woes.

Unknown to us in the press, Israel's pragmatic new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had blessed a secret effort to test Arafat's willingness to make peace by authorizing direct negotiations with his PLO. As peace talks sponsored by Secretary of State Jim Baker ground on in Madrid, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were secretly meeting under Norwegian auspices in Oslo, bonding over meals of smoked fish and vodka. My friend Uri Savir, who worked for Shimon Peres, whom Rabin had put in charge of the secret back channel, attended many of the meetings, which began in January 1993. Though we spoke often by phone during those tense months, I had no idea what he was doing.

I was pursuing my own post-Kuwait preoccupation: the growth of militant Islamic forces, especially Hamas, which means “zeal” in Arabic. Hamas was growing stronger in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Created in late 1987 after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories, Hamas was committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state in Palestine and any peace treaty with the “Zionist enemy.” It also challenged the PLO's status as the “sole” representative of the Palestinians. Israel had come to view Hamas and other militant Islamist groups—which had begun killing Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks and suicide bombings—as
more dangerous than the PLO. But in yet another bitter Middle Eastern irony, the Israelis themselves had initially encouraged the formation of such groups as Hamas to counter the PLO in its more radical phase. They quickly regretted such support.

Prime Minister Rabin became increasingly frustrated by Washington's unwillingness to block financing from the United States for Hamas and like-minded groups. The State Department, FBI, and CIA denied the existence of such financial links, despite intelligence that Israel shared with them. Rabin, I learned, might be willing to share this information with an American journalist. An Arab American used-car salesman from Bridgeview, Illinois, Muhammad Abdel-Hamid Salah, had been arrested in Jerusalem in January and was accused of being a Hamas courier, carrying money for Hamas from US donors. Ehud Ya'ari, an Israeli reporter, had written an op-ed in the
Times
asserting that Hamas's command center was in the United States and that the group had an extensive donor network in America. While I believed the Israelis, I knew that finding evidence about a Hamas presence in America would be challenging.

I had met Rabin in 1971 during my first trip to Israel when I was a student, but I did not know him well. He apparently knew my reporting from the Arab world. When he offered me an interview and exclusive access to Yaakov Perry, chief of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, Clyde Haberman, our gracious Jerusalem correspondent, encouraged me to follow up in Israel. This was really an American story, we agreed. Whatever I heard in Jerusalem would have to be confirmed in Washington. After talking to Clyde, Joe Lelyveld approved my trip to Israel, though reluctantly. A turf-obsessed bureaucracy, the
Times
resisted reportorial big-footing. And Joe knew that Israel's allegations, though newsworthy if true, were likely to spark controversy and greater tension between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

Rabin told me that the United States was the source of about $30 million a year in funding for Hamas and its terror attacks. Some of the money was Iranian, he said, but American banks were being used as conduits. Some of the money was simply carried in cash by messengers such as Muhammad Salah.

As I pushed for more evidence, Shin Bet chief Perry produced photocopies of checks and bank records showing money transfers from the United States to Hamas affiliates, travel vouchers, and copies of intercepted internal communications between Muhammad Salah and top Hamas figures in London and Springfield, Virginia, allegedly Hamas's American headquarters. The evidence seemed persuasive that this forty-two-year-old used-car dealer, now in an Israeli prison, was, in fact, a senior Hamas activist who had traveled to Jerusalem, his fourth such trip to Israel, to provide money and strategic advice to the group.

Checks and bank transfer records could be forged, I told Perry; travel vouchers and telephone intercepts, fabricated. How could I know that Salah was cooperating freely with Israeli officials, as they alleged? Was he being tortured, as his lawyer had told me?

American officials, moreover, were still insisting that Hamas had no network in America. I needed more evidence. Once again, I met with Rabin. Before I could write a story, I told him, I had to see Salah myself and hear him discuss Hamas's structure in the United States. Rabin flashed his trademark crooked smile. I was, as he had been warned, a “pushy broad,” he told me. I took it as a compliment.

Days later, I was sitting in a small room in the Governor's Building, Israel's highest-security prison in the occupied West Bank, next to the room in which Muhammad Salah was being interrogated. Though Salah did not know it, I was watching him on a television monitor as he spoke with his Israeli interrogator.

For the next hour, I heard Salah discuss in English and Arabic Hamas's structure in America, his role in the group, and its operations. He said he had given Hamas agents in the occupied territories $130,000 in cash in one week, of which $110,000 was intended for arms purchases, the building of new safe houses, recruitment of members, and assistance to fugitives. His superiors had authorized him to spend up to $650,000 on this trip, and they had deposited $600,000 into various bank accounts for him to purchase weapons or whatever Hamas needed.

The group's American political command, he told the interrogator, was the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), an ostensible
Arab think tank in Springfield, Virginia, less than an hour's drive from Washington, DC. Its political chief was Mousa Abu Marzook, in Springfield, a Palestinian refugee who had an engineering degree in the United States and founded the think tank in 1989. Another key figure was the institute's head, Ahmed Youssef, a writer whose code name was Abu Ahmed.

While Marzook would not grant me an interview, despite numerous requests, he had repeatedly denied through spokesmen like Youssef that he was involved with Hamas or other Islamic groups that endorsed violence. As of August 2014, Marzook was still representing Hamas as a key leader in the cease-fire talks that Israelis and Palestinians were conducting in Cairo following the latest Israeli-Gaza war.

Ahmed Youssef, too, had repeatedly denied links to Hamas. His center, he said, simply conducted research on Middle Eastern and Islamic topics and was supported by private donations and the studies it sold. Its journal listed as “editorial advisors” several prominent academics, among them John Esposito, who then headed Georgetown University's Arab-funded Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and Yvonne Haddad, of the University of Massachusetts, whom the think tank had listed as a board member despite her refusal to join the advisory board, she later told me.
³
Only after Hamas beat Yasir Arafat's PLO in parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 did Youssef move to the territories and openly acknowledge the affiliation he had long denied. He was then, and remains, a key adviser to Hamas leaders.

In retrospect, the FBI and other government intelligence agencies had been clueless about Hamas and the highly active American base that Israeli leaders and a few Islamist watchers maintained existed. Few journalists believed Israel. Some who did were afraid of being branded bigots or “anti-Muslim.” Such fears among federal investigators and journalists enabled men like Marzook and Youssef to use America's political freedoms to support and finance networks that had killed dozens of Israeli civilians. Only in 1997 was Hamas added to the State Department's terrorist list.

My front-page story in the
Times
reporting that Hamas had drawn “critical financial support and political and military guidance from agents in the United States” was published in mid-February 1993.
⁴
It caused a
firestorm. Under my agreement with Rabin, which the
Times
had approved, I could not reveal that I had visited the security center or witnessed Salah's interrogation, which enabled some journalists and academics to accuse me of having been duped by the Israelis.

Peter Jennings, the ABC broadcaster who had spent years reporting on the Arabs, was one of the few to give me the benefit of the doubt, though begrudgingly. Over drinks days after the story was published, he asked me to explain why I thought that the Israelis had not manufactured the evidence I had been shown. Though I wanted to tell him the truth, I had to protect my sources: among them, Prime Minister Rabin. I told him only that I had reasons to believe Israel's claims about Hamas which I could not share with anyone. “If the author of this piece had been anybody but you,” he told me, “I would not believe it.” It was the nicest backhanded compliment a colleague had ever paid me.

My warning about the rise of Hamas and even more violent Islamic groups in America was soon vindicated. On February 26, nine days after the story was published, American-based Islamists bombed the World Trade Center, killing six, injuring over a thousand, and blowing a hole the size of a football field in the tower's basement. The State Department and intelligence agencies could no longer deny the danger that such fanatics posed. But still the FBI failed to grasp the implications of the terrifying attack that had foreshadowed 9/11.

By the fall of that year, I had decided to write a book about the rise of Islamic militancy. I asked for and got a yearlong book leave, the first the
Times
had given me. Joe Lelyveld, who had written two books, was sympathetic.

I was thrilled to receive an invitation to attend the results of the secret Oslo meetings: the ceremony on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, to watch Israel and its long-standing enemy, the PLO, sign the Declaration of Principles. The next day, Israel and Jordan would initial an “agenda for peace” at the State Department.