by Robert Baer
My first phone call from the White House situation room came at 0834. A navy ensign informed me that the president was considering dispatching a carrier to the Gulf but wanted to hear what the CIA’s directorate of operations had to say before giving the order. Now the heat was on.
I knew we didn’t have a source, so it was time to think out of the box. I took a flier and called up the Saudi desk to see if they’d noticed any usual activity in Iraq. Bedouin crossed the Iraqi-Saudi border all the time. Maybe one of them had picked up a rumor. The desk officer said without missing a beat, “There’s nothing at all. Nothing.”
I knew she was telling me the truth, but it was still hard to believe. Saudi Arabia was supposed to be our ally. We had troops based in the kingdom. We kept a fleet in the Gulf and F-15s patrolling it because of the Saudis. Before I could ask if we could send a message to our good friends in the desert, the desk officer said, “And there’s no point in asking.[text omitted]
With Saudi Arabia out, Kuwait was my last chance. I called the chief there on a secure phone. He and I had known each other since serving together in India in the late 1970s. He’d arrived in New Delhi wet behind the ears but now was in management, on his way up.
“The Kuwaitis don’t have the slightest idea what Saddam’s up to,” he said. “I can have them call up to the border to see what’s going on.” It was grabbing at straws, but there was no choice.
He called me back fifteen minutes later. He said a Kuwaiti border guard with a pair of binoculars could see an Iraqi tank and its crew. “They’re only digging in, eating lunch,” the chief said.
Coincidentally, two minutes later, George Tenet was on the line from the White House. At the time he was head of intelligence programs at the National Security Council, responsible for relaying updates on the crisis to the situation room. “What the fuck is going on in Iraq?” he shouted.
I passed on the chief’s remarks. Tenet, clearly not satisfied, grunted and hung up.
It went on like that all day and the next. I would call Kuwait and stay on the phone until someone could get ahold of the Kuwaiti border guard with the binoculars. As I waited, I wondered: Is this what all that money for intelligence is buying us? A pair of binoculars?
It was at this point that I started to wonder what else we didn’t know about the northern Gulf. Fine, Saddam and Iraq were closed off to the world. It was hard to collect intelligence there. But what about our friends like Kuwait or, better, Saudi Arabia, the heart that pumped our economic life blood?
I started reading the reports coming out of Riyadh. There was essentially nothing. They all had to do with the travel of some congressional delegation, cultural events, book fairs, all spin, no substance. There was not a word about divisions in the royal family or their relations with the Wahhabis. If you went by the embassy reporting, the officers weren’t even meeting the Wahhabi clerics, who seemed to be getting more powerful than the Al Sa’ud.
I looked through the databases back to 1986. There wasn’t much you couldn’t find in the newspapers and academic journals. It was like the Kuwaiti and the binoculars: When it came to the Gulf, we were blind. If the place were to go up in flames, we wouldn’t know until it was too late.
As I headed across the parking lot that day in December 1997, I figured I could do better on my own, particularly if I was living in the Middle East. In fact, I was headed to Beirut that afternoon.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to see that the Beirut I landed in wasn’t the Beirut I’d left in 1988. Then it was a city divided by civil war; now it was one huge, sprawling construction site. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was in the middle of restoring the old downtown, calling on the services of the world’s best architects. He had even excavated a part of the old Roman Beirut. An ultramodern tunnel was being dug under the city to clear up its notorious traffic. There was a new freeway to the airport. Give the place a few years, and it would rival Paris and London.
Still, it was the Middle East, and a lot of open wounds needed to be sewn up before it could be whole again. On Christmas Eve that year, the taxi driver who took me from the Muslim west to the Christian east said that it was the first time he’d crossed the Green Line - that no-man’s-land of the civil war. I’d soon be reminded that things weren’t what they seemed in the Middle East.
It started when a friend back in Washington asked me to look into the Qatar opposition that had taken refuge in Beirut and Damascus. He was interested in a rogue prince, a very close relation of the current Amir. His name was Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad Al Thani. I give you the full name because it seems that almost every prince in Qatar has a Hamad or a Jasim in his name. The foreign minister’s name is Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al Thani. The Amir’s name is Hamad bin Khalifah. For simplicity, I’ll call the exiled Hamad bin Jasim the black prince.
The black prince was the former minister of economy and the chief of police. He had tried to overthrow the Amir in February 1996, with the backing of the Amir’s father, Khalifah, who himself had been overthrown by his son in 1995. If it sounds confusing, it is. But the point is that Qatar is the center of intrigue in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria all backed the February 1996 coup attempt and were continuing to undermine the Qatari government. Qatar was not only wobbly and a source of fascination to anyone who cared about Gulf politics; it was also a big prize for the world’s oil companies. In addition to its oil reserves, Qatar owned one of the biggest gas fields in the world. It was also flirting with the Israelis, and that meant the black prince was a figure of importance to a lot of people in Washington.
To even find out where the black prince lived wouldn’t be easy. I started by looking up my old friends in Beirut. After something like fifty meetings in Hamra’s smoky coffeehouses, I found someone who knew the prince was living in Damascus, in a compound reserved for senior military and intelligence officers. That put him out of reach. It wasn’t like I could go and knock on his door. I wouldn’t have made it past the gate guards. I pulled out my Rolodex and got back on the phone.
Eventually, I got to one of the black prince’s “business” associates, who agreed to set up a meeting in Lebanon. The one condition was that it take place in the Park Hotel, in the Biqa’ Valley. The Park Hotel, outside Shtawrah, was run by Syrian intelligence. The black prince must have figured that I would never dare grab him there, if that was my intention. After all, Qatar and the United States were close friends, and in the black prince’s view of the world, it would be logical for his cousin the Amir to send an American to do his dirty work.
A mystery writer could not have picked a better night. Sheets of freezing rain swept across the Biqa’, knocking branches off trees. Shtawrah was deserted, black as a grave. Even the Syrian checkpoints along the main Damascus-Beirut highway were abandoned.
The lights were out at the Park Hotel. I wouldn’t have been able to find it if not for the driver. When we pulled up, half a dozen gaunt, bearded men stood under the hotel’s portico, cradling AK-47s. They didn’t say a word when I got out. Not even a nod of welcome. They followed me into the hotel.
Inside, the lone concierge was waiting for me. He motioned me to follow him up to the second story. We walked down a long, pitch-black corridor, the gunmen still behind. The concierge knocked on a door that looked like the rest. The black prince opened it. A bit heavy, dressed in fatigues and combat boots, with a black-and-white kaffiyeh around his neck, he looked like a Palestinian fighter, not a Gulf prince. The room was dark except for a gas-burning stove in the corner. As the black prince made tea, he said, “You know, I was with Arafat in the early days, at the beginning of the civil war. I trained in his camps. I fought alongside him.”
I already knew that, but it was important to hear it from him. He was trying to tell me that I shouldn’t take him for one of his soft Al Thani cousins or Saudi royalty. He was a fighter. A revolutionary. Someone I shouldn’t mess with.
It didn’t take long for him to come to the reason he’d agreed to see me. He wanted to know about
the relationship between Washington and his country’s foreign minister, Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al Thani, or “good Hamad,” as he was known to Qatar’s Washington lobbyist. The foreign minister was a Washington darling, having hosted several Arab economic summits to which Israel was invited. He’d also allowed Israel to open an economic mission in Doha, one step toward diplomatic recognition. He had promised democratic elections, women were now allowed to drive, and Enron had recently been let into a multibillion-dollar natural-gas deal. On top of it, the foreign minister was almost as socially acceptable as Bandar - he owned a tasteful estate on Foxhall Road, maybe D.C.’s most expensive neighborhood. With those kinds of credentials, he could wander in and out of the White House anytime he wanted, just like Bandar had. The black prince, though, wanted to know if the foreign minister had the White House in his pocket.
“So has my cousin bought a seat on your National Security Council?” the black prince asked.
“No one buys and sells Washington,” I shot back. “He’s the goddamn foreign minister, and he’s rich. Sure he can pretend he owns the place, but he can’t buy it.”
“Hmm… you have a lot to learn, my friend. We need to talk.”
THE BLACK PRINCE and I kept in touch. As things warmed up in the spring and he trusted me more, we met in restaurants in the mountains above Beirut. We usually sat outside and smoked water pipes until late in the night.
We talked about Qatar, mostly. It was clear right away that the black prince wanted to make another stab at overthrowing his cousin and his nemesis, the Amir and the foreign minister. At one point he asked me if I could help him find landing craft. Going along with the ploy, I called an arms dealer in Paris who sent me some data on military landing craft for sale in the Ukraine. It worked like a charm. The black prince invited me to his home in Damascus. He had built himself a two-story house in a military compound northwest of Damascus. It had a pool and a football-field-size lawn. It wasn’t exactly a palace, but then again, we were in socialist Syria.
The first part of the afternoon, we sat around the pool drinking lemonade. His new Egyptian wife joined us for a while. I noticed a man barbecuing next door. He was wearing an apron and a baseball cap. He could have been one of my uncles.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“General Khuli,” the black prince said, waving across the fence to him.
Muhammad Khuli had been the chief of Syrian air force intelligence. He was removed in the mid-1980s when he was implicated in trying to blow up an El Al flight departing London at Heathrow. A bomb had been planted in the suitcase of an unwitting pregnant Irish girl. I wouldn’t say it was an intelligence coup to watch Khuli cook a hamburger, but I couldn’t help remarking on the irony that I’d had to leave the CIA before I could get this sort of access to the bad guys.
Before I could think about it too much, the black prince said, “Let’s take a drive.”
We piled into his new American SUV and headed for the Israeli border, to the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. We pulled off the main road and headed up the side of a hill. It was now dark, and every once in a while the bodyguard got out to remove boulders that had tumbled into the road. Finally, we pulled off onto a piece of ground that had been leveled by bulldozers. “This beautiful plot is mine,” the black prince said. “I just bought it. One day I will build a house here that will look onto liberated Palestine.” He was referring to Israel.
While we walked around, the driver and the bodyguard made a fire from wood we’d brought along. They set up two camp chairs and put a pot of water on the fire for tea. Although it was late spring, it was cold, and the wind had started to pick up. Sparks from the fire blew across the mountain in a long arc. When we were comfortably seated in the camp chairs and under thick blankets, the black prince launched into what he’d brought me here to tell me.
“Do you know anything about my cousin Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir?” He was talking about the foreign minister with the estate on Foxhall.
By now I felt I could level with the black prince and he would understand what I was saying. I told him about running into the foreign minister in the office of Leon Feurth, Al Gore’s national security adviser. I mentioned how I’d been asked to leave so Gore could have a one-on-one with the foreign minister.
The black prince turned his head to get a better look at me. I think he wanted to see if I was telling him the truth. Was that all I knew about the foreign minister?
“Look, my friend, I don’t know whether you will be honest with me or not. But your government is playing a very dangerous game.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Let’s start with bin Laden. The foreign minister is one of his main backers and hates the Saudis. He would make a bargain with the devil to fuck the Al Sa’ud.”
I knew that much. When I was still in the CIA, I’d heard Sultan and the other senior princes refer to the foreign minister as “the dog.” I also ran across some information that Sultan had indeed backed the black prince and the former Amir in the February 1996 coup attempt. But since the Saudis had refused to talk to us about it, we could not be absolutely sure.
“What do you mean, back bin Laden?”
I knew that the interior minister, ‘Abdallah bin Khalid, had met Osama bin Laden on August 10, 1996, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. A lot of Arabs were making the pilgrimage to Khartoum to see bin Laden. Iraqi intelligence had met with bin Laden on several occasions. Although we couldn’t be positive, we assumed the emissaries were only taking bin Laden’s measure, making sure he wasn’t about to turn on them.
“I mean back him. Do you know who Khalid Sheikh Hamad is?” In Qatari Arabic, the “mu” is dropped on the word “Muhammad.” The black prince was referring to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
“No,” I said. I wanted him to tell me the story from beginning to end.
“He is bin Laden’s chief of terrorist operations. His target of choice is airplanes. In 1995 I was chief of police when he landed in Qatar. He’d come from the Philippines after a couple of his henchmen were arrested. He was immediately taken under the wing of the interior minister, ‘Abdallah bin Khalid, who is a fanatic Wahhabi. The Amir then ordered me to help ‘Abdallah. The first things he asked for were twenty blank Qatari passports. I know he gave them to Khalid Sheikh, who filled in the names.”
“Do you have proof of this?”
“Yes. I still have the numbers in my safe back in Damascus, and a lot of other stuff.”
It was becoming clear to me that the black prince wanted me to do something with this information. By now he had checked me out and found that I was a former CIA officer. I’m certain he thought - most Arabs do - that I was still working for the place. I wasn’t about to disabuse him of his belief. I wanted to hear the rest of the story.
“Where is Khalid Sheikh now?” I asked. (KSM was still at large then, with a starting price tag on his head of $2 million.)
“Flew the coop. Gone. Sayonara. You know as well as I, so don’t play stupid.”
“I want to hear what you heard.” When Khalid Sheikh Muhammad left Qatar in 1996, I wasn’t sure of the circumstances.
“As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha, the Amir and the foreign minister ordered ‘Abdallah bin Khalid to move KSM out of his apartment to ‘Abdallah’s beach estate. In the meantime, agents of the Ministry of Interior cleared out Khalid Sheikh’s offices - the former police academy, a farm, and a place called the north depot.”
The black prince could see I was incredulous. He called the bodyguard over to bring me a pen and paper. “You write all this down and check with Washington.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“Maybe Prague. I know at least Muhammad Shawqi Islambuli went there.” Islambuli was the brother of Khalid Shawqi Islambuli, the Muslim Brother who’d emptied an AK-47 magazine into Anwar Sadat’s chest in 1981. Muhammad himself was wanted in Egypt for murder.
I didn’t say anything while I made a few notes. When I finished, I asked,
“And you have proof of all this?”
“And a lot more. Remember, I was the minister of economy. Whenever it came time to put money into U.S. elections, I did it.”
I DIDN’T CARE about foreign governments putting money into U.S. elections. But I did care about Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and I already knew about the so-called Bojinka plot - KSM’s plan to blow up U.S. passenger airlines. I had to take the black prince seriously. But how could I get the information to the CIA? In spite of what the black prince thought, once you’re out of the CIA, you’re out.
I did the only thing I could. I e-mailed a friend still in the CIA and asked him to pass on my information to the Counter-Terrorist Center. As insecure as that connection was, I included all the data, including the black prince’s name. If nothing else, I figured, that should ring a bell. I hoped Washington would send out someone to talk to him and collect whatever he had locked up in his safe. It couldn’t hurt to hear the guy out.
My friend wrote back the next week: no interest.
I was never one to give up, so I called a New York Times reporter named Jim Risen. If the black prince’s story checked out - especially the documents - the Times would probably run a story and force someone to pay attention to one of our allies in the Gulf supporting bin Laden, by this time one of the world’s most lethal terrorists.
By the time Risen had enough to pursue the story, I’d moved to New York. The black prince was still prepared to spill his guts. Unfortunately, just as Risen was about to get on a plane to go see him, the black prince was kidnapped in Beirut and flown back to Doha. At this writing, he is locked up in a windowless jail, and his family says he’s being injected with debilitating drugs. As soon as he disappeared into the black hole that is the Gulf, hard facts became nearly impossible to get.