Sleeping With The Devil

by Robert Baer

  Tom and I talked mostly about the mechanics of getting me into Syria. Headquarters had routed me though Amman in order to bypass the Damascus airport, which was closely watched by Syrian intelligence. If I took a taxi from Amman to Damascus, I could slip in and out of the country before the Syrians noticed, or so the plan went.

  When we finished, I asked Tom about the Syrian Muslim Brothers.

  He shrugged. “The Jordanians give them money and refuge, but only because they hate the Syrians - ‘my enemies’ enemy is my friend’ sort of deal.”

  “What do the Jordanians say about them?” I asked.

  “We don’t press the Jordanians for details. And they don’t volunteer anything. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t a target for us.”

  What Twetten was telling me was that he had no instructions to spy on the Muslim Brotherhood. CIA posts overseas are only supposed to spy on countries or terrorist groups that headquarters tell them to spy on. I can’t tell you for sure, but the Soviet Union must have been Amman’s number one priority, with China maybe a distant second. In practical terms, it meant that almost every case officer working for Twetten spent his days and nights chasing Soviet diplomats, hoping one might agree to spy for the CIA. In his spare time, an Amman case officer might take a Chinese diplomat out for lunch, but only if he couldn’t find a Soviet. Since the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t a target, Amman wasn’t supposed to waste time or money on them, not even a quarter for a couple of falafel sandwiches.

  Twetten also had the problem of the CIA’s white-as-rice culture. Back then - and this wouldn’t change much, right up until I left the CIA in December 1997 - most case officers were middle-aged, Caucasian Protestant males with liberal-arts degrees. If they had any experience, it was in the military. Few spoke Arabic, and the ones who did spoke it badly. (Spending all your time with Russian-speaking diplomats didn’t do anything for your Arabic.) Since most Brothers spoke little English, a nearly insurmountable cultural and language barrier existed between the CIA and the Brothers. Even if Twetten had any incentive to go after the Brothers, the chances of one of his officers ever running into one, let alone being able to talk with him, let alone recruiting him, were close to zero.

  Amman was the model for the rest of the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood - and radical Sunni Islam in general - was off the CIA’s radar scope. Maybe a handful of analysts back at headquarters followed it in their spare time, but with no input from the directorate of operations and no spies in the Brotherhood, they had to draw on open sources, mostly journalists and academics, and they weren’t doing so well themselves.

  Ever since Nasser shut down the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954, finding a Brother to interview - a militant one, at least - had been nearly impossible. They’d buried themselves too deeply underground, and Saudi Arabia, which became the Brotherhood’s patron after 1954, was a book as closed as the Brothers. Academics and journalists were rarely granted visas to the kingdom. The few who were couldn’t get close to the Muslim Brotherhood offices, mosques, divinity schools, and madrasahs. In other words, militant Islam was a deep black hole. When Osama bin Laden emerged publicly in the late 1990s, for most Americans, he might as well have popped up out of hell.

  In fairness, it wasn’t all the CIA’s fault. Until September 11, there wasn’t a president who cared whether Langley spied on the Brothers. During the cold war, presidents lost sleep worrying about the Soviet Union and its nukes. A third-world dictator who ended up with a Brother’s bullet between his eyes was near the bottom of the White House’s list of gnawing worries. Basically, the CIA existed, and always had, to spy on the Soviet Union. Something like 60 percent or more of the CIA’s budget was dedicated to giving the president a heads-up on whether those nukes were on the way. Every dirty war the CIA got involved in, from the Bay of Pigs to Angola, had something to do with containing communism. Sure, a president might have an occasional question about a place like South Africa or Japan, but as far as he was concerned, the rest of the world was a footnote.

  That, at least, is the official explanation - which is to say, it’s the one that official Washington wants you to believe. The real answer is infinitely more complicated. Yes, the Soviet Union was a distraction. And yes, the Muslim Brothers were hard to get to. But at the bottom of it all was this dirty little secret in Washington: The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against (what else?) communism. This covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers - Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department - when they approved Saudi Arabia’s funding of Egypt’s Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist. He’d nationalized Egypt’s big-business industries, including the Suez Canal. He bought his weapons from the Soviet Union. He was threatening to bulldoze Israel into the sea. The logic of the cold war led to a clear conclusion: If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided political assassination was permissible, that was fine, too, so long as no one talked about it in polite company.

  Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off the books. There was no CIA finding, no memorandum of notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. In other words, no record. All the White House had to do was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim Brothers, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. That’s what happened during the Yemeni civil war that got under way in 1962. When Nasser backed an anti-American government and sent troops to help it, Washington quietly gave Riyadh approval to back Yemen’s Muslim Brothers against the Egyptians. As Tom Twetten said, the enemy of my enemy is always my friend: It’s an ironclad rule in the Middle East.

  If the CIA had spied on the Brothers, that would only end up exposing them for what they were - mass murderers who, if you gave them any thought at all, could be counted on to turn against us one day. If Tom Twetten or any other CIA officer in the Middle East were somehow to turn over a rock and tattle to Washington, his next job would be running the basement candy stand at Langley, maybe on the same shift as the Berlin case officer turned towel man who tried to recruit a Saudi diplomat.

  The CIA has requested that this section - related to foreign funding of the Muslim Brotherhood - be deleted.

  [text omitted]In 1980 President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: America would match, dollar for dollar, Saudi money going to the Afghan resistance of the Soviet occupation. (To give you an idea of the money involved, in 1981 alone, Saudi Arabia kicked in $5.5 billion.) So far, so good. But if you read the fine print, you see that the bulk of the money went to the militant Muslim groups, including Abdul Sayyaf’s.

  Sayyaf, the head of the Ittehad-e-Islami, was a particularly dangerous man to give money and weapons to. While a student at Islam’s oldest and best-known university, Cairo’s al-Azhar, he was recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood. Afterward, just in case he hadn’t completely absorbed the lesson of jihad and righteous murder, he did an apprenticeship with the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. His bloody tracts and sermons were public, but no one in Washington raised a yellow flag, let alone a red one, for fear of upsetting Riyadh.

  If the Saudis and Pakistanis were partial to the Afghan Muslim Brothers, the wisdom in Washington said that was the price you had to pay if you expected them to do the dirty work. And if the Muslim Brothers were cold-blooded murderers and crazy enough to take on a Soviet armored column with small arms, all the better. Washington has always prided itself in fighting wars on the cheap. If success was a high Soviet body count per dollar, then the Muslim Brothers were a fabulous bargain.

  It occurs to me that if John Ashcroft had been attorney general back then, I and everyone else who played a part in [text omitted] and Afghanistan would have found ourselves on one of his al Qaeda lists. No doubt about it, we were aiding and abetting the people who would become our archenemies. Hell, I’d probably be writing this from a cage in Guantanamo Bay.

  I HADN’T FIGURED OUT any of
this as I settled into the backseat of a dinged yellow 1965 Plymouth taxi that was going to make it to Damascus only if Allah willed it. All I knew was that Islam seemed like a calm sea - sunny and flat on the surface, but with all kinds of things going on below.

  The Muslim Brothers seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. How else could they survive in a police state like Syria? How did they infiltrate themselves and their weapons from Jordan into Syria? And why weren’t the Jordanians - or, for that matter, the Egyptians - telling us anything about them? The Muslim Brothers were one of those subterranean truths in the Middle East that we find out about only when they decide to surface. Today there’s even a name for these places where the real truths (as opposed to the convenient ones) reside: the Arab basement.

  The moment I saw Major ‘Ali pull up in his Soviet-military UAZ jeep, I knew the detour through Amman and the day-long taxi ride had been a waste of time. Not only did he have two armed thugs in the backseat, but his chase car and follow car were packed with soldiers in full battle gear. One carried a belt-fed RPD machine gun, another a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that stuck out the window.

  The major’s Mad Max caravan accompanied us everywhere. When we pulled up in front of Damascus’s main department store, his soldiers blocked the doors and cut off access to the parking lot so we could browse without someone popping us. When we lunched at a restaurant on the Barada River, they restricted the entrances, including the kitchen door. People had to wait to get in or out until we were done. All through lunch, one of ‘Ali’s gunmen stood directly behind him, cradling a locked-and-loaded Kalashnikov. Traveling with this circus, I never could have gotten in and out of Syria unnoticed.

  The second day of my visit, I got around to slipping in a question about the Muslim Brothers.

  “I don’t know,” ‘Ali answered. “They’re just crazy. The only thing they know is killing.”

  “Are they going to win?” I asked.

  By way of an answer, ‘Ali gave me a quick tour of Damascus’s terrorist sites. The air force headquarters, which hadn’t been completely rebuilt after the Muslim Brotherhood car-bombed it, was ringed with cement barriers and sandbagged positions. Both ends of the street in front of Asad’s apartment were barricaded with concrete. It was the same with the Soviet embassy. Armored vehicles were patrolling the streets, and the police were stopping cars and pedestrians for random checks. Damascus might as well have been a concentration camp.

  We drove next to old Damascus and a street named a Street Called Straight. It might have been straight when it was laid out by Alexander the Great’s city planners, but now it wound through the old city’s maze of shops, open-air spice stands, donkey carts, hawkers, itinerant vegetable sellers, and children running in all directions. It was late afternoon, and the place was packed with end-of-day shoppers. Some women wore head scarves; most didn’t. You could barely hear amid the shouting. ‘Ali swept his hands over the chaos. “Here are your Brothers.”

  When we got back to his apartment, he added, “Oh, we’ll win, all right, but only with this.” As he spoke, he slapped the pistol at his side.

  I left Damascus the following day without ‘Ali ever telling me anything about the Muslim Brotherhood. He also hadn’t let slip a thing about his religion or how Asad had pulled off the miracle of holding on to power for so long. Although we got along well enough, ‘Ali was as clannish as the rest of the Alawites. He had no intention of tutoring me or any other American official on what made Syria tick.

  I’m sure headquarters concluded that sending me to Damascus had been a waste of a plane ticket and too much cab fare, but the trip hooked me on the Middle East, mostly thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood. They were still a complete mystery to me - a riddle to be solved. One thing did seem obvious. Even if Asad managed to rout the Brothers, they would not go quietly back into their caves.

  INDIA PROVED to be a good rear base for keeping an eye on an increasingly volatile Syria, and for filling the gaps in my learning that ‘Ali had declined to tutor me on. The Brothers tried to assassinate Asad on June 25, 1980. I don’t know how close they got, but it was close enough to really piss him off. The following morning Damascus woke up to the whir of helicopters putting down at a military cantonment west of Damascus. The copters loaded up two companies of Asad’s elite guard unit, the Defense Companies, then flew east to Palmyra’s notorious military prison where Muslim Brothers were being held. Waiting guards threw open the doors, and the Defense Companies stormed in, moving from cell to cell, executing prisoners. The Brothers had only enough time to yell, “God is great! God is great!” Although something like five hundred Brothers died that day, the Brotherhood wasn’t intimidated.

  In February 1982 the Syrian Muslim Brothers seized Hama on the Orontes River, Syria’s fourth largest city, with roots going back to the Bronze Age. When they started to cut the throats of Alawite officials and their families, Asad acted. He called in the Defense Companies again and ordered, “Level it.” After a couple days of continuous shelling, the center of Hama was a smoldering pile of rubble. An estimated twenty thousand people were killed, including, presumably, most of the Brothers. Hafiz al-Asad wasn’t happy to go down in history as the butcher of Hama or the man who destroyed a world-class historic city, but it was either that or run for it, along with one million other Alawites. The Brothers would never again pose a serious threat to Asad.

  (An old Syrian joke has God sending the Angel of Death to Damascus to summon Asad to judgment. A few days later, the angel returns to heaven, battered and bloody, having been worked over by Asad’s notorious secret police. “Oh no,” God shrieks in horror, “you didn’t tell them who sent you?”)

  Asad systematically removed anyone suspected of being a Brother from any institution that had anything to do with Islam. Every cleric, Friday prayer leader, soothsayer, corpse washer, and madrasah teacher was vetted and revetted. Even a long-forgotten, veiled reference to jihad was enough to land a cleric in jail or put him out of a job. Just as it had in the army, the system worked. By the time of Hafiz al-Asad’s death, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood existed in name only. There wasn’t a peep out of anyone when another Alawite, Asad’s son Bashar, succeeded him. The only Syrian Brothers left to complain were in exile, mostly in Saudi Arabia and Germany.

  The second part to Asad’s strategy will be familiar to any Mafia don. Asad knew he had to keep his friends close and his enemies closer, which meant never letting Saudi Arabia get out of sight. His brother Rifa’t al-Asad, the commander of the Defense Companies, married the sister of Crown Prince ‘Abdallah’s wife. Closer to the jugular, Asad held the threat of terrorism over the heads of the Al Sa’ud. His intelligence services kept close ties with Palestinian terrorist groups who could strike at will inside Saudi Arabia, and he made it crystal-clear to the Al Sa’ud that if they backed a terrorist attack in Syria, they could expect a Palestinian attack in the return mail.

  Asad also courted the Saudi Shi’a opposition. Although they make up only about 10 to 12 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population, the Shi’a provide the critical labor for the oil fields in the Eastern Province. Almost as oppressed as Christians in Sunni-Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a are prone to violence. Asad allowed the Shi’a leaders to open up offices in Damascus and Beirut, as a reminder for the Al Sa’ud that he wasn’t above blowing up their wells. It wasn’t long before Saudi “charity” money for the Brothers inside Syria dried up.

  So, Major ‘Ali had been half right about taking care of the Brothers. Turning Hama into a landfill had blunted the Brothers’ terror campaign. But it was Middle Eastern politics that did the trick: promising revenge; placing family, allies, and pawns in positions of power and influence; and above all, never compromising.

  IF ONLY EGYPT, which spawned the Brotherhood, had done the same. Instead, it let things drift and paid the price. Even after Nasser banned the Brothers in 1954, al-Azhar University continued to crank out fundamentalist preachers. Modest neighborhoods in Cairo, such as Abdin - where
Muhammad Atta, the presumed team leader of September 11, grew up - were heavily under the influence of the Brothers, as were parts of Alexandria and Assyut.

  The world witnessed the bloody consequences on October 6, 1981, when Egypt’s Islamic Jihad - another name for the militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood - assassinated Anwar Sadat. I’ll never forget watching the TV clips played over and over the next day. The brazenness of the attack, in broad daylight, in front of the world’s press, in the middle of a military parade, oblivious of Sadat’s bodyguards, suggested a group that would stop at nothing. They all knew they would die in the attack or be executed at the end of a show trial. But death wasn’t a threat, and Sadat wasn’t the end of it. In 1993 the Muslim Brothers, again under the name of the Islamic Jihad, tried to kill the interior minister and later the prime minister. In 1995 they tried to kill Hosni Mubarak while he was visiting Ethiopia. Two years later, the Brothers attacked the temple at Luxor, killing fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians.

  And, of course, they attacked once more on September 11, 2001, in New York City and suburban Washington, D.C. I’ll never forget watching those TV clips over and over, either. The press kept calling the attackers al Qaeda, thanks to Osama bin Laden’s relentless publicity machine, but it was the Muslim Brothers through and through - the same crew we had used to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan, and plenty of other places. Only now we had become their dirty work, and Saudi Arabia their home.

  8. Guess Who Came to Dinner