Sleeping With The Devil

by Robert Baer

  THE THIRD LEG of the triangle - the Wahhabis and the industrial West - has always been the wild card.

  Externally, petroleum and the wealth it generated wrenched Saudi Arabia into the mid- and late twentieth century. The formation of OPEC in 1960 handed the House of Sa’ud a lever by which it could begin prying itself loose from its corporate masters in America. American politicians helped, too. For a quarter of a century after World War II, the United States, not Saudi Arabia, held the global surplus oil balance, largely by domestically storing vast amounts of petroleum bought abroad. By the mid-1950s, though, independent U.S. oil producers and American coal companies had had their fill of foreign imports. After trying and failing to stem the flow with voluntary restrictions, President Dwight Eisenhower imposed mandatory quotas on foreign oil imports in 1959. Fourteen years later, when Richard Nixon removed the import quotas, the U.S. had exhausted its surplus and become a net importer of oil. It didn’t take long for the Arab world to punish America for its neglect.

  On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel, kicking off the Yom Kippur War. Two weeks later, on October 19, OPEC announced a total embargo on oil exports to the United States, in retaliation for American and Western support of Israel during the war. The next day, Saudi King Faysal, whom American officials were convinced would never take part in an embargo against the West, joined it, bowing to pressure brought by a coalition of other Arab producers and the kingdom’s Wahhabi Muslim clergy. Suddenly, the petrodollar spigot acquired new dimensions - you could open it up to make money, or close it off to make even more.

  Within seven decades, Riyadh exploded from a mean compound of thirty thousand inhabitants to a sprawling metropolitan area of over four million people. Muslim and non-Muslim foreigners poured into the kingdom to work in the oil fields. At the same time, Saudis made wealthy by oil poured out of the country: to American universities (some two hundred thousand Saudis have been educated in American schools since the end of World War II), to London and Paris and Rome to shop for luxury goods, to playgrounds in every corner of the world.

  Overnight, a medieval society seemed to become a modern one. Always under the surface were the House of Sa’ud’s longtime supporters, their base, their strength, their brotherhood of warriors: the Russian arms dealer Yuri’s “crazy Vahabis.” For the Wahhabis, modernity was the one implacable enemy. In geology, when plates of the earth’s crust move in opposite directions, earthquakes result. The plate tectonics of societies and cultures work the same way.

  Even Ibn Sa’ud had been unable to fully control his puritan fanatics, especially the leaders of the Ikwhan. Some of those who wouldn’t submit to his authority Ibn Sa’ud simply had mowed down; others he brought to Riyadh, where they were imprisoned until there was nothing of them to remember.

  By the late 1960s, the fault lines that always existed between the moderation necessary to get along in the larger world - diplomatically, militarily, and economically - and the rigid puritanism demanded by the same faith had begun to pull dangerously apart. Ibn Sa’ud was succeeded upon his death in 1953 by his free-spending son Crown Prince Sa’ud. Other members of the royal family, along with religious leaders, wrested authority from the crown prince by 1958 and forced his abdication in 1964 in favor of his half brother Faysal, but the pattern of royal excess wouldn’t disappear. Nor would the Wahhabis’ insistence that Islam be purified. Ironically, it was the Israelis who showed them how.

  On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, quickly and decisively defeating all three countries. From Jordan, Israel captured the West Bank and Jerusalem; from Syria, the Golan Heights; and from Egypt, the Sinai Desert. It was maybe the most humiliating defeat the Arabs had ever suffered, at least since they were forced out of Spain in 1492, just as Columbus was sailing for America. But for some Muslims, it was much worse. They had lost Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam.

  At first Arabs reacted by pouring into the streets in outrage, protesting mostly against the U.S. Then they realized they had been betrayed by their own governments. All the arms they had bought over the years had done them no good. Why? Because so much of the money that was supposed to go into defense had ended up in the pockets of corrupt princes, politicians, and military officers. That’s an old lesson, but there was a new one to be learned from the 1967 debacle. A much larger Arab force had been defeated by a relatively tiny state based on religious cohesiveness: Israel. Wouldn’t the Arabs be stronger if they reorganized according to their own belief, Islam?

  The Wahhabis, egged on by their Egyptian and Syrian fundamentalist mentors, took the lesson to heart. See, we told you so, they started to preach in the mosques; God conquers all. Anxious not to be conquered itself, the House of Sa’ud climbed aboard the bandwagon even before it was fully built. Beginning in the early 1970s, the royal family and charities administered by family members used their vast reservoirs of petrodollars to build a network of mosques and religious schools, in the kingdom and abroad, where a fresh generation of Muslim teenagers could be indoctrinated into the most violent and radical interpretation of Islam: intolerance to innovation, the imposition of Allah’s law as it appears in the Qur’an, and death to the infidels occupying the domains of Islam.

  Far from being a threat to American interests, the schools, or madrasahs, served them extravagantly. From the very onset of the cold war, U.S. strategists were determined to establish Saudi Arabia and its leaders as a kind of sacred bulwark against godless communism. Just as Saddam Hussein would later be demonized by American propagandists, so Ibn Sa’ud and his successors were lionized as defenders of the faith, guardians of the holy shrines, “the nearest we have to a successor of the caliphs,” one breathless U.S. ambassador wrote of Ibn Sa’ud.

  The Wahhabis relished their role as the voice of militant Islam: stern of demeanor, committed beyond Western understanding, willing to die for their beliefs. And the madrasahs were the place to recruit, a supermarket of spiritual warriors. In the 1980s the schools were the main breeding ground for the Islamic militants called to holy war against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. Armed with U.S.-supplied weapons, backed with U.S. money and logistic support, the “Arab-Afghans” drove the Red Army back to Moscow, crippled a superpower, and arguably changed the course of history - a success by every measure of warfare and geopolitics.

  Trouble was, an infidel was an infidel, whether he wore a red star on his uniform and patrolled the streets of Kabul or supported the Jewish occupation of Arab soil. Militant Saudi Islam also proved more unwieldy than the computer models at the National Defense University and elsewhere had projected. Like kudzu, the impulse toward jihad began to wind its way around everything. Most alarming, the use of Arab “freedom fighters” in the crusade against communism combined Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood to create the perfect storm. No, it was worse than that. It was like mixing nitroglycerin in a blender. But it would take decades for America to feel the blast, and then Washington would pretend it had nothing to do with it. Even today many of the bright boys along the Potomac can’t stop congratulating themselves on what a great deal we made with Saudi Arabia.

  7. The Honeymoon

  Amman, Jordan - February 1980

  IT WAS THE TAIL END of dusk as the plane banked to land at the Queen Alia airport. I could just make out Amman in the distance, sitting out there on the edge of the Syrian Desert. Carved out of ragged limestone hills, it glowed like a garnet. It looked, well, biblical.

  Too bad I wouldn’t get to see much of it. Early the next morning, I was going on to Damascus to track down a Syrian major I’d met in India. Normally, the CIA wouldn’t have risked sending me into a country like Syria to meet someone I barely knew, but he was an Alawite, the minority sect that had ruled Syria with an iron grip for the last ten years. The CIA knew virtually nothing about the Alawites. Clannish and closemouthed, they were as good as impossible to recruit as sources. Few had ever defected. It was a long shot t
hat anything would come of the meeting, but the CIA thought it was worth the price of the ticket.

  I had my own agenda. I was starting to get interested in the Muslim Brotherhood. Ideally, I would have asked for an assignment to Saudi Arabia, where so many of the Brothers were coming to roost even back then; I could have learned a lot by simply poking around. But Saudi Arabia was a closed society, shielded from the curious, and the State Department never would have let a CIA officer loose there for fear of offending the Saudis. Syria, I figured, wasn’t a bad second choice. The Alawites, after all, seemed to have figured out how to deal with the Brotherhood, or at least keep it at bay. Learning how they did it was sure to tell me something, and my Syrian-officer connection seemed like a promising guide. I will call him ‘Ali.

  Before leaving India, I’d read everything I could about the Alawites. The majority of Syrians were Sunni Muslims, about 74 percent; the Alawites represented only 11 percent of the population. Nonetheless, the Alawites held every position that had anything to do with power. Hafiz al-Asad, the president, was an Alawite. So were the key army and air force generals. Every important job in Syria’s half-dozen intelligence services was held by an Alawite. But more than anything, it was the handpicked midlevel Alawite army officers who prevented some Sunni colonel from attempting a coup.

  Let’s say a Sunni colonel needed to move one of his tanks across Damascus, maybe for repairs. He couldn’t load it on a transport and send it off, as colonels in most armies around the world could. Before he could even pull the transport out of its shed, the colonel had to get the permission of the senior Alawite in his regiment. It didn’t matter that the Alawite might be only a major or captain, or that his position had nothing to do with repairing tanks. The point was that Asad trusted the junior officer - the Alawite - and not the Sunni colonel. Answering to a subordinate didn’t do much for the colonel’s morale, but Asad went to bed at night relatively sure that the colonel wouldn’t be tempted to detour his tank to the president’s front door and knock it down with a 125-mm armor-piercing round. Alawite officers were something like political commissars in the old Soviet Red army.

  Years later, a former Alawite officer would tell me a story to illustrate how finely tuned the system was. Late one night a second lieutenant commanding a forward position on the Golan Heights was surprised to hear his military landline ring. It was a little past four, and the front was quiet; there was no conceivable reason for headquarters to be calling. The lieutenant’s curiosity turned to suspicion when the caller asked for his name. He demanded the caller identify himself. When he understood it was Asad on the line, the lieutenant almost knocked over the telephone leaping to attention. His initial thought was that he had unknowingly committed some hideous act of lèse-majesté and was about to lose his head. He calmed down as Asad asked a few questions about the front, but his astonishment rushed back when Asad asked after his two children - by name. Assured they were well, Syria’s head of state said good-bye and hung up.

  My Alawite officer friend swore that Asad hadn’t checked the lieutenant’s file before he called. As a young officer, he said, Asad had made it a habit to know all of his fellow Alawite officers by name, clan, and family, and those same officers carried him to power in 1970. When Asad rose to a position that gave him access to military personnel files, he read them all, including the Sunnis’ and Christians’. Asad had a remarkable memory for detail. He could tell you all about an officer’s training record, evaluations, and assignments. Knowing his officer corps inside and out was what kept Asad in power for thirty years, until he died in his bed on June 10, 2000. As we used to say in the CIA, Asad had “coup-proofed” Syria.

  Needless to say, the system didn’t make the Alawites popular, especially with Syria’s Sunni majority. To make matters worse, the Sunnis questioned whether the Alawites were even real Muslims. Not much is known about Alawite beliefs; they have no canon. Alawite elders transmit their tenets orally from one generation to the next, but since an elder is usually in his wheelchair by the time he receives the truth, he’s not inclined to chat about it. The little that is certain is Alawites believe in a sort of trinity - heresy to orthodox Muslims, who hold that Allah’s power is indivisible. The Alawites’ enemies also accuse them of many other ugly heresies, from drinking wine in the mosque to being a lost tribe of Israel.

  Still worse, Asad was minister of defense when Syria and the rest of the Arab world were humiliated in the Six Days War of 1967. Syria’s Sunni Muslims blamed Asad personally, alleging that if he had been Sunni, a true believer, he never would have let such a colossal defeat happen. As long as Asad was alive, he had this stinging accusation ringing in his ears. He knew that if he ever made a single concession to Israel - anything short of getting back all the land he lost during that war - the growing ranks of Islamic fanatics would accuse him of betrayal and, worse, apostasy. Asad knew early on what the West is beginning to sense: that the wave of Islam was going to be one hell of a ride.

  Not surprisingly, Syrian Sunnis despise the Alawites and dream in the darkness of night about one day overthrowing them. Syria’s Islamic fanatics, the Muslim Brotherhood, actually tried. In 1973, when Asad dropped a clause in the Syrian constitution that the president had to be a Muslim, Muslim Brother-inspired riots broke out all over the country. Asad was forced to restore the clause, but the damage was done. The Muslim Brothers started assassinating Alawites and even targeted their “Christian” allies, the Soviet military advisers who helped keep Syria a thorn in the West’s side. On June 16, 1979, the Muslim Brothers attacked an artillery school in Aleppo, picking out Alawite cadets for execution. In 1980, in sympathy with the Iranian revolution, Syrians took to the streets again, demanding an Islamic state - one not headed by infidel Alawites.

  Sitting at my desk in South India, the more I read, the more curious I grew about the Muslim Brothers. Back then I knew almost nothing about Islam, but from what I’d seen in Madras and elsewhere on the subcontinent, Muslims were relatively tame. Sure, they might riot and burn Hindu shops, but the outbursts rarely lasted over a day or two, and the discontent never turned into terrorism. India’s Muslims weren’t assassinating politicians or setting off car bombs, like the Brothers.

  I asked headquarters for a backgrounder on the Muslim Brotherhood and got back a one-page regurgitation of what was already public. At least it was a decent primer on the group’s history. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian, Hassan al-Banna, to purify Islam and rid Egypt of foreign influence. In 1947 it turned to violence, attacking Jewish-owned businesses in Cairo. A year later, the government banned the Muslim Brotherhood. “When words are buried, hands make their move,” al-Banna was widely quoted as saying when he heard the news. On December 28, 1948, the Brothers made good on al-Banna’s prophecy by assassinating the Egyptian prime minister. The government responded by cutting off the snake’s head, killing al-Banna in 1949, but that only made the Brothers more fanatical. After al-Banna’s successors made an attempt on Egyptian president Nasser’s life in 1954, Nasser shut down the Muslim Brotherhood altogether, driving it underground and into exile.

  Most of the Brothers ended up in Saudi Arabia, but not all. Some fled to Syria, where students returning from Egypt in the 1930s had founded a branch. Eventually, the Syrian government would grind that under its heel and send the Brothers scurrying again, most to the Saudis but some to West Germany (where they would establish the cells that set the stage for September 11). Others remained in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria, driven underground but not out of existence.

  That was the extent of the available information. Based on headquarters’ messages, I gathered that the CIA knew next to nothing about the Muslim Brotherhood. My assumption was that it didn’t have a source, a spy, a plant, anything, anywhere in the organization. The agency clearly had no idea how the Syrian Brothers were organized or where they were getting their money, and frankly, I was surprised.

  Even from remote India, I could tell the Brotherhood w
as spreading like a virus. Branches had popped up in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere, but Syria seemed to be the real problem. It could make or break a peace settlement with Israel. Officially, Washington wanted Asad gone - he was armed by the Soviet Union and sided with them in almost every international dispute - but if he were replaced by the Brothers, you could count on things getting a lot worse. If history was any guide, the Brothers weren’t going to sit around Asad’s palace smoking his Havana-leaf cigars; they would be at the front, leading an attack on Israel. How could the CIA not know whether the Brothers had any chance of taking over Syria? Not having a spy in the Brotherhood was as unthinkable as the pope not having a spy next to Martin Luther.

  Then again, I’d been with the CIA only a couple of years and didn’t yet understand the way things worked.

  THAT NIGHT IN AMMAN I kicked back at the Intercontinental Hotel bar with a beer, confident I would succeed where my colleagues had failed. Once in Damascus, I would convince Major ‘Ali to tell me all about the Brothers. He’d give me the hard facts, the ones that headquarters didn’t have. ‘Ali might be an Alawite, but I figured that since his life was on the line, he would have made it his business to know about the enemy. (Did I mention I was young and naive?) Of course, I would have preferred to get the facts from a real, live Syrian Muslim Brother, but that seemed a long shot, since I had no idea where to find one.

  The next morning before heading off for Damascus, I went to see Amman’s chief, Tom Twetten. I had known Tom from when he was deputy in Delhi and I was in Madras. Slim and prematurely gray, Tom was friendly and competent. I suspected even then that he was on his way up, and he did go on to become the CIA’s deputy director of operations. At the end of Tom’s career, in one of those ironic twists of fate, his son-in-law was murdered when Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.