The European
October 22, 1992
The Foreign Office official said that before the Soviet Union disintegrated, there were strict controls [on sophisticated arms sales to other countries], “although we did not like where they were exporting equipment such as Scud missiles.” Today, however, apart from a degree of central control in Russia, there was no legislation in place to check arms sales, the official said.
The Times of London
October 10, 1992
A British businessman was arrested in Germany yesterday on suspicion of smuggling 80 kilograms of plutonium from Russia. Such a quantity of plutonium, if enriched, could be used to make several atomic bombs.
The Times of London
November 4, 1992
Thousands of Iranians, celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran, joined in a vocal “Death to America” message to President-elect Bill Clinton on Wednesday. “You know Bush has lost and Clinton won,” a speaker told the rally marking the day in 1979 when Iranian students took over the embassy. “What we have to say to the new administration is: ‘Death to America.’ ”
International Herald Tribune
November 5, 1992
State-of-the-art technologies are pouring into Iran as European, Asian, and US companies rush to profit from Tehran’s attempt to infuse its Islamic revolution with modern science and to rehabilitate the economy. Much of the technology being transferred to Iran in the export boom is categorized as militarily useful by the US government, but relatively little is being held back. That is because of policy differences on Iran between Washington and its allies.... The technology reaching Iran includes radar testing devices, navigation and avionics equipment, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, digital switches, high-speed computers, remote sensors and jet engines, according to these sources.
International Herald Tribune
November 11, 1992
White-robed Islamic militants gathered, in defiance of a government ban, to call for revolution. “Islam is at war on many fronts!” a speaker shouted, seated under a banner urging his followers to kill all nonbelievers. “We must rid ourselves of the infidels who rule this country, the Jews, the Christians, and the Communists! All are different, but all are united in their determination to exterminate Muslims!”... It was a signal that Egypt, with one-third of the Arab world’s population, is in danger of losing its struggle against the regional spread of militant Islam.
New York Times Service
November 13, 1992
Ukrainian leaders have threatened to hold up approval of the treaty sharply reducing intercontinental nuclear missiles unless their new nation receives a substantial increase in Western aid. With Ukraine’s economy faltering badly, leaders of the government and parliament have declared with growing determination in recent days that they will not part with strategic missiles “for free.”... Diplomats said enriched uranium scavenged from the warheads could bring hundreds of millions of dollars.
International Herald Tribune
November 14, 1992
Egyptian fundamentalists will keep up their attacks on tourism because of its corrupting influence, a spokesman for the underground Islamic organization Jamaa Islamiya said. “Tourists bring alien customs and morals that offend Islam, especially the attire of some women,” he said in Cairo. “Tourism must be hit because it is corrupt.”
Associated Press
November 25, 1992
The world may be sitting on top of the next nuclear crisis without even knowing it. That is because at least five Middle Eastern countries—Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Algeria—are working to develop nuclear weapons.... They are buying strategic technologies from Western companies. They are also attempting to acquire nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union.
Editorial in the New York Times
November 26, 1992
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Nuclear materials have probably been smuggled out of at least one former Soviet republic, raising new alarms about proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Wednesday. Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat from Georgia, who just returned from a trip to five former Soviet republics, said that senior officials in Belarus—one of the four former republics that still has nuclear weapons on its soil—told of “several cases” of intercepting uranium as smugglers sought to take it across the border into Poland.
International Herald Tribune
November 26, 1992
Investigators looking into a recent rash of European criminal cases involving illicit smuggling and sale of radioactive materials say they have found evidence of thefts from former Soviet and East European nuclear plants, both commercial and nuclear.... Evidence in these cases suggests that freelance con artists and small groups of criminals are crossing borders opened after the end of the Cold War in search of quick profits from potentially dangerous radioactive contraband, and that the smugglers are using routes and methods adapted from Europe’s heroin and illicit cigarette trades.... Uranium of the sort being seized in the smuggling cases could prove useful to a nuclear bomb manufacturer if acquired in large enough quantities.
Washington Post Service
November 30, 1992
U.S. intelligence analysts are divided on the issue of what Iran’s $2 billion-a-year military buildup—including its nuclear program—means, and whether Iran could replace Iraq as an aggressive, expansionist military threat in the Gulf region in the coming years.... The new report also draws strong conclusions about the leadership in Tehran, asserting that President Hashemi Rafsanjani has built a team of nuclear experts, many of them educated in the United States, to direct a nuclear program. Based on their activities, as well as on Iran’s nuclear research and development programs, the study concludes that there is more certainty about Iran’s intentions.... The worst case scenario for Iran has been articulated by Mr. Gates. He said in an Associated Press interview published last week that Tehran could pose a threat to the United States and its allies in the Gulf within three to five years.
New York Times Service
December 1, 1992
Saudi Arabia has been thrown into an open struggle between the ruling al-Saud family and the increasingly powerful religious establishment. King Fahd has been forced to make the unprecedented move of dismissing more than half of the country’s religious council because of its implicit support for a petition criticizing his rule.... Though Fahd is an absolute ruler, his political legitimacy is based on his claim to rule an Islamic society.... This latest upsurge of religious extremism dates back to the Gulf war, when Fahd allowed 500,000 allied troops into Saudi Arabia. Ultra-conservatives opposed the presence of “foreign infidels.”
It also attacked the kingdom’s foreign policy for accommodating “interests of Western governments.”
The Sunday Times
December 13, 1992
Federal authorities arrested a suspect Thursday in the bombing of the World Trade Center and said others were being sought. The man arrested was a member of a Muslim fundamentalist group.
International Herald Tribune
March 5, 1993
As long as they have nuclear weapons, and as long as there is a market, you will probably see people in Kazakhstan—not necessarily the government, but maybe the entrepreneurs or unemployed apparatchiks—who will try to turn a quick buck through the sale of weapon components.... Given the political entente, it would surprise me greatly if nuclear weapons cooperation had not only been discussed, but deals actually consummated, where Kazakhstan has provided nuclear weapons to Iran.
Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy
Washington, D.C.
Interviewed on BBC-TV Dispatches Program
May 12, 1993
To make an atomic bomb, a terrorist or a would-be proliferator would need to get hold of only 5 kg of weapon-grade plutonium or 15 kg of weapon-grade uranium, less than you would need to fill a fruit bowl.
At present the world probably contains about 250 tons of this sort of plutonium and about 1500 tons of the uranium. To lose one bomb’s worth from the stock is the equivalent of losing a single word from one of three copies of The Economist. But the loss would be harder to detect. The world’s stock of nuclear explosive material is dispersed and hoarded. Almost none of this material is covered by international nuclear-accounting rules. And more than half of it is inside the chaotic relic of the former Soviet Union.
The Economist
June 5, 1993
With the help of a confidential informer operating inside a suspected bombing ring, federal agents recorded many private conversations of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric who has been blamed for inspiring terrorism in Egypt and the United States.... Six of the eight men arrested on Thursday in a plot to assassinate political leaders and bomb the United Nations, the FBI’s New York headquarters and two commuter tunnels, were followers of the sheikh.... As a loosely knit organization, Al Fuqra turned to Mr. Hampton-El and perhaps a few others in the Black Muslim community to provide it with weapons and expertise in carrying out attacks, the detective said.
International Herald Tribune
June 28, 1993
Eighteen months after Algeria’s military leadership canceled the country’s first free parliamentary elections to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from coming to power, the already violent struggle between security forces and Muslim guerrillas appears to have entered a more ominous phase. Islamic extremists appear to have embarked on a new terror campaign in the past three months.... The killings have already sent shivers of fear and suspicion through Algeria’s middle-class professional community.
Washington Post Service
June 28, 1993
The visions were apocalyptic: bomb blasts spreading fire and smoke through United Nations headquarters and a lower Manhattan skyscraper that houses, of all things, the New York offices of the FBI. Other explosions the same day in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels under the Hudson River, crushing motorists inside cars turned to twisted junk, killing many more by spreading intense heat, smoke and noxious fumes throughout the enclosed space of the tubes. Thousands dead, thousands more injured, the nation’s biggest city in a wild panic. It was supposed to happen this week, stunning America with a new and ghoulish kind of pre-Fourth of July fireworks display.
Time
July 5, 1993
The Islamic Group, led by Sheikh Abdel Rahman, vowed in Cairo for the first time to launch a retaliatory terrorist campaign against US targets in Egypt and the United States. “We will hit American targets,” said a leader of the Islamic Group in the militant stronghold of Imbaba, “and not just American targets in Egypt, but throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.” In a sign of concern Saturday about possible retaliation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened the command post that it uses to keep watch over crises.
International Herald Tribune
July 5, 1993
The true security nightmare is a nuclear weapon locked in a trunk in the parking lot at Washington’s Union Station. Even a crude atomic bomb could level buildings for miles around ground zero. The resulting fireball would radiate at the speed of sound, incinerating every bit of steel, concrete and human flesh in its path and igniting a holocaust that would make Dresden look like a birthday candle. What’s keeping a terrorist group from going nuclear? Building an atomic bomb requires two things: knowledge and material.
Newsweek
July 12, 1993
A nightmare scenario confronts Western governments trying to grapple with the problem of fundamentalism in Egypt: the government of President Hosni Mubarak falls, to be replaced by an Islamic regime; Egypt joins the Islamic government in Sudan to subvert the already shaky regimes in Algeria and Libya and then turns east to undermine the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. By the end of this century Israel will be surrounded by radical governments, millions of refugees will have fled to Europe (further destabilising already weak economies), leaving Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in a state of armed confrontation which has not been seen since the Second World War. For the past few months the intelligence community and policy makers have been trying to measure the enormity of the challenge posed by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. What is now understood is that unless action is taken to combat the growing political and military power of the fundamentalists, there will be serious economic and political consequences that could undermine the entire international community.
The Times of London
August 22, 1993
On Sunday Gadhafi invited the world’s two most notorious Palestinian terrorists, Ahmed Jibril and Abu Nidal, to visit Tripoli, perhaps to set up headquarters there. The Libyan leader told a cheering crowd in the town of Azizia that the invitations were meant to defy the United Nations.... Intelligence reports link Jibril and his General Command organization to the planning of the Pan Am massacre, which cost 270 lives.
Washington Post
December 15, 1993
Criminal groups are already trafficking in nuclear materials and could conceivably acquire nuclear weapons one day.
Newsweek
December 13, 1993
(Author’s note: This book originally went to press in early 1994.)
“I looked and there before me was a pale horse!
Its rider was named Death,
and Hades was following close behind him.
They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill
by sword, famine and plague.”
REVELATION 6:8
Acknowledgments
I would like to use this acknowledgments section not only as an opportunity to express my thanks to the many people and organizations who helped me in the development of this book, but also to share with readers some of the challenges of this research. In order for this story to ring true, three very difficult topics had to be researched—the conflicts of the Chechen-Ingush region, the current threat of dissemination of nuclear armaments, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. I am thankful I did not realize how much work would be involved before beginning this project, but God blessed me throughout.
In addition to library and archival research, most of my novels are based on scores of personal interviews. This requires developing a huge pool of potential contacts. In preparation for Riders of the Pale Horse, I approached dozens of organizations with experience in evangelical efforts in the Middle East and North Africa. What surprised me was how difficult it was to find even one person involved in Middle Eastern evangelism who was willing to speak with me. The reasons for this reluctance were some that I had never faced before. Perhaps the reader would find it of interest to hear of three of these experiences:
In late 1992 a conference took place in London entitled “Islam and the Suffering Church.” Authorities on the Christian movement in Muslim countries were brought in from various Asian, Middle Eastern, and African states. In order to attend, a request had to be made at least two weeks in advance, and had to include the name of the participant’s local pastor. Only after the pastor was contacted would a ticket be issued. Arriving participants were required to present both ticket and passport in order to gain entry. No late entries were permitted, no matter what their credentials.
The general secretary of one Middle East evangelical organization told me bluntly that his missionaries had insisted that nothing be either stated or written about them, as it endangered both their efforts and their lives. In view of this fear, they had disbanded their magazine eight months before.
My publisher in the United Kingdom was able to make a contact for me with an Anglican missionary who had just returned from Jordan the previous month. The interview was done by telephone, and the man used an assumed name. I was required to promise in advance that I would not attempt to name either him or the organization that had sent him overseas.
Over thirty contacts were made, and resulted in only five interviews, all of them u
nder clandestine conditions. When I asked for reasons behind their caution, I was presented with the polarity of the situation. On the one hand, every missionary with whom I spoke repeated over and over how kind and hospitable and friendly the vast majority of Arabs were. The dangers, they related, came from a small but very lethal minority. It was essential, they told me time and time again, that if I wished to have my story reflect the truth of today’s Middle East, I could not describe the Arabs as being either generally dangerous or evil or anti-Christian. It would be as incorrect as describing every American as being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Those with whom I was able to speak related numerous conversion stories, many involving entire families. They also spoke of many other cases where families were quite happy to accept a new Christian convert within their clan. They described how essential it was for young Arabs, who now saw the burning fanatical anger offered by Islamic fundamentalism, to be shown a grace-filled alternative. They discussed the joy that filled their lives when they saw the living God awaken a new heart.
But they also spoke of the danger.
Danger caused by a minority, yes, but still a danger. And as the number of fundamentalists grows, so too does their threat. I offer three examples:
A missionary working in Pakistan and the Central Asian states told me that after several of his converts had been discovered and murdered, they had decided to structure their church in the form of cell units, as were used by war-time underground armies. It assured that if any were caught and forced to talk, they would only be able to implicate a few of their fellow believers.
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