Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “He was. But I don’t remember his name. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 25

  WE SAT ON A BLANKET on the bare cement floor and picked at a plate of flatbread, olives, and yogurt, and drank tea. Blackout curtains covered the window, but I could tell it was turning light.

  “The Iranian.” I said. “Frankly, I find it hard to believe he’s dead.”

  It wasn’t going to help to tell Nabil about my history with the photo. But if Mousavi really was dead, I was more confused than ever as to why Millis had dragged it along with him to the Breezeway Motel. Or why anyone wanted to grab it from me now.

  “Whatever this man means to you, he’s dead. I’m sure.”

  “Someone misinformed you maybe.”

  “My people were there. A bombardment in Lebanon, two years ago. A 155-round landed on the house he was sleeping in.”

  It was all a waste of time coming here, I thought. I was out of questions, frustrated, not sure where to go next. And yet a minute later, I don’t know what it was—training, twenty-five years of running informants, curiosity—but I realized I’d come too far to stop asking questions now.

  “Tell me about the day the photo was taken.”

  Nabil said he was coming back from Karachi and stopped by to see bin Laden. Bin Laden had guests. They were closeted in a back bedroom when he arrived.

  “First to come out was bin Laden. Then an old man, a foreigner. He was wearing a salwar chemise.”

  Nabil picked up the picture and pointed at the man with the missing head.

  “I think it was him. He had a cane, but you can’t see it in the photo.”

  “A foreigner?”

  “An American. He spoke to me in English. He had an American accent.”

  That surprised me. Even during the Afghan war when bin Laden was nominally allied with the United States, he was a strict Wahhabi and avoided Americans. Europeans, too. Nabil must have been mistaken. Maybe it was a foreigner who spoke American English.

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why was he there?”

  “He couldn’t stand for very long. Bin Laden was worried about his health. But the man seemed perfectly at ease, like he’d known bin Laden for a long time. I wondered if he was one of those Americans who seem happy only when they’re away from home. I have no idea why he was there.”

  “He spoke English with bin Laden?”

  “No. He spoke to bin Laden in Arabic. And later he spoke to me in Arabic. Fluent, classical Arabic.”

  That was even stranger.

  “Then I heard him and the Iranian speaking in Farsi. They spoke very fast. It sounded to me like the American’s Farsi was fluent, too.”

  “Wait. The American knew the Iranian?”

  Now it was getting really interesting. For a start, only a handful of Westerners speak both fluent Arabic and Farsi. But throw in the fact that he knew the man who may have kidnapped and killed Bill Buckley, and I was starting to understand why someone had cut this man’s head out of the photo. Who in the hell was he? I still wasn’t convinced he was American.

  “Did the Iranian have red hair?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I can’t remember. There are a lot of Iranians with red hair.”

  “His eyes?”

  “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

  This wasn’t going anywhere, and my interest shifted back to the American. The easy answer was he was a journalist. The war was hot. Bin Laden was a scoop. But then again I’d never heard of an American journalist speaking fluent Arabic and Farsi. And they certainly don’t make friends with Iranian Pasdaran officers. Something about that day was critically important. I just couldn’t nail it down.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who took the picture?”

  “Khalid.”

  “Khalid who?”

  “I never knew his surname even though he was always at bin Laden’s house. He was a Kuwaiti. And like the Iranian, the American knew Khalid. He kept putting his hand on Khalid’s shoulder. The American had a camera with him. He asked Khalid to take the picture. ‘To memorialize the passing of the torch,’ he said. I remember because I didn’t know what he meant. Khalid drove away that day in the same car with the American and the Iranian.”

  “Don’t you find this all very strange?”

  “I don’t have an answer. You need to talk to the other person who was there that day. A Kuwaiti. A prince of the Al Sabah.” He pointed to the young man, almost a boy, immediately to bin Laden’s right.

  I’d forgotten the Gulf prince. Neither Millis nor I could place him, and I’d just assumed he was some inconsequential hanger-on.

  “The prince knows Khalid. And he has this very strange story, which I know only part of.”

  “Where is he now?” I said.

  “In Lebanon. The Biqa’ Valley.”

  Lebanon wasn’t my first choice of places to go—hell, it wasn’t my second or third choice, either. The Pasdaran still had free range of the country, and if they thought I was back looking for Buckley’s kidnapper, they might try to put an end to my hunt for good. But now with this new piece of information that there was an American—or whoever he was—in touch with both bin Laden and a Pasdaran officer, there was no way I wasn’t going to go see Prince Al Sabah and ask him what he knew about it.

  One of the Fedayeen was waiting outside to lead me back to my hotel. When I turned to say good-bye to Nabil, he was still sitting in his plastic lawn chair, looking at the picture of his mother and father. In a way, we weren’t that different, both of us shoved in a corner, our room for maneuvering narrowing by the day, both hanging on to a photo.

  CHAPTER 26

  MAX, YOU BASTARD, where’d you get to?” Yuri sounded genuinely pissed.

  “I met a girl in Larnaca. We got to drinking, and, well, you know, when I woke up, your boat was gone.”

  “You went at it for twenty-four hours? Wow.”

  I knew I was running this girl thing into the ground. But the fact is that in this business you pretty much have to orient your life around a lie—or “cover for action,” as headquarters calls it. If you’re in Moscow and you own a dog, you spend your two-year tour walking Moscow’s streets and parks. It gives you a reason for being out late at night, getting up at the crack of dawn, wandering around strange neighborhoods picking up shit. Antique collecting, jogging, amateur archaeology—they all work the same way. I can’t remember when, but by default my cover for action became women. It seemed to still be working, at least with Yuri.

  “I need to get to Lebanon,” I told him, “but not through the front door.”

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to fly from Tel Aviv to Amman, Jordan, and from there on to Beirut on an overstretched German passport or an even more overworked Irish one, although that was certainly part of it. I also had to consider that I’d used Rafik Hariri to bait the Saudi trap, and I didn’t want anyone thinking I was now heading to the prime minister’s office in Lebanon. That’s the problem with misdirection: You unknowingly burn bridges you might need later.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll fix it,” Yuri said. “I got a car leaving tonight. Call this number in Ramallah, and they’ll tell you where to go.”

  You make a Russian your friend, and he sticks with you the whole way, potholes and all.

  The number Yuri gave me led me to a garage just outside Ramallah—more accurately, a shed with a pit decorated with portraits of suicide bombers and presided over by a lone mechanic changing the transmission on a twenty-year-old Peugeot. After the mechanic made me a glass of tea, he took me around back to a sparkling Mercedes that looked as if it had just come out of the showroom.

  “A 2001,” he said, polishing the door handle with a rag.

  Twenty minutes later a Palestinian in his twenties showed up, wearing Top-Siders, Quicksilver jeans, and a polo shirt. He put me in the passenger seat and we headed of
f east, to Jordan. Two miles from the border, we stopped by the side of the road so the driver could switch the yellow Israeli plates for green Palestinian ones.

  As soon as we crossed the Israeli line, he stopped again and exchanged the Palestinian plates for Jordanian ones. Jordanian customs was a breeze—five minutes flat. The driver seemed to know everyone by first name.

  We were halfway to Amman when it finally dawned on me what Yuri did for a living these days: He fenced cars. The new Audis and Porsches and Beemers waiting to board the boat in La Spezia, the new Mercedes I was riding in were all stolen.

  By the time we passed through Amman and were heading to the Syrian border, I was dead asleep. I woke up just enough at the next checkpoint to give the driver my German passport (at least I thought it was the German one), but I might just as well have handed him a four-day pass to Disney World. Yuri’s networks clearly included Syrian immigrations and customs.

  By the time I emerged into the land of the living again, the car was bouncing along a rutted dirt road. Dusk was turning to dark, but it was light enough to see we were ascending up into the anti-Lebanon range. Below was Zabadani, the old Iranian camp that was used to supply the Pasdaran in the 1980s, a stark reminder that I was about to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

  When we got to the top of the pass, the road was hardly a cow path. We slowed down to a crawl, driving off the path to avoid boulders. My driver obviously knew the road. At the very top, someone had plowed a path through the remaining patches of snow. There wasn’t a Syrian or Lebanese border guard in sight.

  The road improved as we dropped down the other side into the Biqa’ Valley. In Hamm, the first village, the road was even paved. Thirty minutes later, in Balabakk, the driver dropped me off in front of the legendary Palmyra Hotel. He might have said ten words the entire way. Nearby, the Roman ruins glowed in the light of a nearly full moon.

  Before I went up to my room, I ordered a taxi for the next morning to take me to Beirut. I wasn’t going to Beirut, but there was no sense in telegraphing that I was really going to Shtawrah.

  CHAPTER 27

  Shtawrah, Lebanon

  SITTING ASTRIDE THE BEIRUT-DAMASCUS HIGHWAY, Shtawrah is the dividing line between East Biqa’ and West Biqa’, ground zero of one of the most continuously dangerous places in the world. I’d come by service taxi, an hour door-to-door from the Palmyra. Not a long trip, but one I didn’t want to make often.

  Shtawrah’s Ritz Hotel is the epicenter of the Biqa’ Valley’s drug trafficking. Walk into its lobby and you’d swear the electricity was off. The only light was one behind the front desk. But the clientele like it that way. The biggest hashish and coke deals in the world are struck in the Ritz’s black alcoves, where the principals can’t be seen.

  There was no doorman, no concierge, no desk clerk for that matter. I wandered around the hotel, starting to feel as if this meeting wasn’t going to happen. Just as I was getting ready to head back to Balabakk, a young man materialized out of the dark in front of my eyes: bespoke silk suit, no tie, a shirt that had Harvie & Hudson written all over it. His slight bone structure and dark skin told me he was from one of the Arab Gulf states. He quietly introduced himself as the nephew of “the sheikh.”

  “Would you follow me, please?” he asked softly.

  “The sheikh?” I asked. We were feeling our way down a darkened corridor. I’d seen the prince only once in a twelve-year-old photo, and I still had no idea which Kuwaiti prince he was. There are tens of thousands of them, and Kuwait was never my strong suit.

  “Prince Sabah Al Sabah,” my guide told me in an even quieter voice, “the grandson of the Amir of Kuwait.” My guide rattled off about thirty names, taking me all the way back to the Prophet. He was halfway there when I conjured up his post-Peshawar bio: Miserable student at Sandhurst. Drinking, gambling, wenching in London. Made it through thanks only to the low bar set for Gulf royalty. I remembered that he’d found his way to Lebanon to fight with the Palestinians but ended up an opium addict. He’d almost died after a liposuction operation at a fat farm in Marbella. Great, I thought, a day with a dope-head tub of lard.

  My guide glided to a stop in front of a door at the far end of a second-floor hallway, knocked once, then motioned me through and closed the door and himself behind me. Even by the low light, I could see that I’d imagined the wrong Kuwaiti prince entirely. The one sitting on the floor, with his elbow on the sofa, reading, was trim, an athlete—little changed from the photo. Then I finally remembered the right Sabah Al Sabah: another grandson of the Amir, except this one graduated Sandhurst in the top five and was a star on the polo team. A runner, too. I’d read somewhere he’d finished in the top ten in the Marine Marathon in Washington, D.C., only a couple years before under some other name.

  As soon as the prince saw me, he jumped up and walked over to shake my hand. He was wearing a cotton crew-neck sweater, neatly starched khaki pants, and American loafers.

  “Thank you for coming to Shtawrah.” He pointed me toward the sofa he’d been leaning on. “I feel safe only in the places where I know what the politics are.”

  He didn’t have to say anything more: Syria controlled Shtawrah and the Biqa’ with an iron fist. For the moment, the prince’s politics coincided with the Syrians’, and that was all the protection he needed.

  As the prince took a chair, the rest of the story came back to me. He’d come to Lebanon immediately after graduation from Sandhurst to fight with the Palestinians. Except, unlike most princes, he really did. I’d seen news footage of him running across a Beirut street, firing a Kalashnikov at a Christian position. I wondered now if Nabil hadn’t been just out of camera’s range. There’d been a nasty fight with the Amir, his grandfather—something about trying to raise money from the Kuwaiti royals for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, followed by a self-imposed exile in the Biqa’. A voice in my head whispered, British wife, scholar, a book on the Israeli lobby in the U.S. I didn’t trust the last part, necessarily. My synapses were starting to short-circuit. In any event, he was too poised and thoughtful to square with his reputation.

  He seemed to be waiting for me to clear my memory banks before he began.

  “I’m delighted the Americans have finally come to talk with me,” he said, satisfied at last that he had my attention. “I thought I was going to have to surrender like the Germans and the Japanese before you would listen to my story.”

  It sounded to me as if Nabil had figured out I was CIA and not a journalist. It didn’t surprise me, and I didn’t see any point in setting the prince straight.

  “No surrender needed here,” I said.

  “Tell me, why did the U.S. stand by bin Laden for so long?”

  I figured he was referring to the phantom bin Laden–U.S. connection. I’d heard about it plenty of times from plenty of Arabs.

  “We didn’t exactly,” I said. “He shows up in Peshawar, offering money and recruits to the Afghans. We were in no position to turn down help, so we left him alone. A sin of omission, not commission.”

  The prince shook his head. “Remember, I was there. I saw with my own eyes the planes coming in from all over the Middle East, believers and guns. Americans were on the tarmac receiving them.”

  “What does that have to do with bin Laden? I don’t recall we gave him any weapons.”

  “I’m not talking about weapons. This war was fought and won thanks to a green light from the United States. Bin Laden was allowed to stay in Peshawar because of you.”

  Good point.

  “Bin Laden can’t keep a secret, you know,” he said, rising and taking the seat directly opposite mine. “That’s what you came to talk to me about, isn’t it? Nabil said you were interested in his American connection.”

  “That and a couple other things,” I said.

  “It’s always been a subject of curiosity for me, your relations with Saudi Arabia. I’m not casting blame, mind you. There was a time you had no choice but to support bin Laden and the
extremists in Saudi Arabia. Anyone could see that. The Iranian revolution threatened to consume the Arab side of the Gulf, chaos would follow, and they’d get their great Shia crescent. The United States had to give the Saudis a backbone, a jihad to avert the people’s eyes from their weakness, so you gave them the Afghan war, and it worked brilliantly. The Shia uprising fizzled. Balance was restored. But now the Middle East is out of kilter again. The Sunni believers think they have the upper hand. They are convinced that they can restore the Khalifate, truly convinced. But that’s not what you came to hear.”

  “I’m hoping you remember this day,” I said as I pulled the Peshawar photo out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  “The way we were. My good friend Sheikh Osama,” the prince said, pointing to bin Laden in the middle. “And there’s Nabil and that Iranian. I never knew his name. I don’t think I ever talked to him, more than a word or two. And here’s…the American,” the prince said, pointing at the headless man in the salwar chemise.

  Two sources over time and space; I was starting to believe he really was American.

  “Why were you there?” I asked.

  “I was seeing bin Laden that morning. There were several of us. It was strange to see an American there.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “He spoke beautiful Arabic, with no accent. Later I asked bin Laden about him. ‘An American,’ he said, ‘he’s the price of admission.’”

  “‘The price of admission’? That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “I asked bin Laden what he meant by that. He only smiled. I immediately thought the American must be CIA. Why else would bin Laden be so coy? You must know about bin Laden’s connections with the CIA. Surely it’s common knowledge at Langley.”

  “Some things are off the books,” I said. I was starting to suspect I was more right than I knew. Officially, at least, the CIA had never met bin Laden. I personally knew every case officer serving in Pakistan in those days. I was in and out of Peshawar when bin Laden was there. If anyone had ever met him, I would have heard.