by Robert Baer
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Six months later, someone would kill five people in the United States with weaponized anthrax, the same stuff left lying on the ground at Vozrozhdeniye, but this time in a form so sophisticated, it would take a Department of Defense lab something like five years to replicate. As I write this, a shipment of dismantled Scud missiles was recently discovered hidden on an unflagged North Korean freighter headed for Sana’, the Yemeni capital. Were the missiles - probably manufactured in North Korea - meant for Yemen, a U.S. ally in the eerie calculus of the Arab world? Were they intended for overland shipment to Iraq, which Yemen supported in the last Gulf War? Or were they a private-placement purchase, using Yemen as a port of convenience? Maybe for some militant splinter group, say, with its own launcher buried in the Arabian desert? All allies are of convenience in the Middle East, and it was, after all, Yemeni nationals who helped bin Laden blow a hole the size of a semi through the armored hull of the U.S.S. Cole. Chances are we’ll never know the whole truth. Maybe even Yuri couldn’t ferret it out. But in the meantime, any of those possibilities seems as likely to me as any other. You want the big stuff these days, you can get it delivered right to your door, or theirs.
2. Circling the Drain
I NEVER CALLED Yuri’s contact in Moscow, and I’ll probably never find out for sure whether his network actually could deliver arms inside Saudi Arabia. But my gut tells me he could. And if not him, then someone else.
Anyhow, I’d already suspected Russian arms dealers were operating inside the kingdom’s borders. They probably had been since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden’s main supply sergeant was Victor Bout, a former Russian military officer who had served in Angola, where he got involved in arms trafficking and oil. Like Yuri’s associate, Bout had a reputation for delivering anything, anywhere, including the nasty stuff. Through a company called Air Cess, which owns one of the largest privately owned jet-transport fleets in the world, Bout works the toughest markets - Iran, Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and Serbia - taking advantage of out-of-the-way airports like Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, and Burgas, Bulgaria. The word was that for the right price, he could find you anything, maybe even a nuke delivered to downtown Riyadh. Although Bout’s connections to bin Laden were exposed in the press, he continues to operate out of Dubai, Saudi Arabia’s main depot for contraband and shady financial transactions. Dubai is where most of the money for the September 11 attacks was banked.
Bout is mostly bullet-proof because the Russian external intelligence service (the SVR) is part owner of Air Cess. What’s more, Russian arms trafficking has become almost a legitimate business: Saudi defense minster Sultan bin ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz tried to get into it. Sultan even hosted a visit to Saudi Arabia by the head Rosvoorouzhenie, Russia’s state arms marketer.
I also didn’t need Yuri to tell me that the kingdom’s 4,431-kilometer land border and 2,640-kilometer shoreline are indefensible. Since before recorded history, Bedouin nomads and smugglers have wandered freely back and forth across the Arabian peninsula, unchecked and uncontrolled. Gold smugglers from India still sail up the Gulf and clandestinely unload their shipments every night. And we already knew Yuri’s crazy Vahabis could get their hands on weapons. They did just fine arming themselves in 1979, when they stormed the Mecca’s Great Mosque.
Loose arms and open borders are never a good sign, but they don’t necessarily mean that a country is about to slip into a civil war or go under. What you need to bring down a regime like the Al Sa’ud is a readiness of its citizens to pick up those arms and use them, to fight and die for their beliefs, in this instance against a heavily armed, well-paid, and very extensive palace guard. Up until September 11, a lot of Middle East watchers, me included, didn’t think the average Saudi fit that description. We all had hardwired in our brains the stereotype of young, oil-rich brats screaming at their Filipino servants to take the wrappers off their candy. Fighting and dying for anything as abstract as a belief seemed beyond their range of probable actions.
September 11 undid that stereotype for me. The fifteen Saudi hijackers were all the proof I need that the kingdom has a reservoir of young men who won’t flinch when faced with death, whether that entails flying planes into skyscrapers or blasting away at the Al Sa’ud or Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure with heavy weapons. Militant Islam has energized young Saudis like we never thought possible.
What about the Saudi royal family’s army of guards, with all of their tanks and airplanes - surely they’re up to taking care of the fanatics? That’s another myth that will take an event as momentous as September 11 to kill. But let’s look at the available evidence. Saudi Arabia’s grim sheriff, Interior Minister Na’if, cares only about protecting the Sa’ud’s grip on power, at the expense of everything and everyone else. [text omitted]
[text omitted]To make his point, Na’if went out of his way to avoid FBI director Louis Freeh. When Freeh showed up in Saudi Arabia to put some teeth into the investigation of the bombing of the U.S. barracks at Khobar, Na’if stayed on his yacht anchored off the coast in the Red Sea, near Jeddah. Freeh met with two low-ranking security officials in the internal security service, neither of whom knew anything about Khobar. The parallel would be for Na’if to come to Washington and be hosted by Freeh’s driver.
It wasn’t like Na’if had the diplomatic sense to keep his hate for Americans out of the press. After September 11, at the worst possible time, Na’if said that the United States, “the great power that controls the earth, now is an enemy of Arabs and Muslims.” In fact, things were a lot worse than even the most rabid Saudi bashers suspected. [text omitted]Al-Rajhi
is the managing director of the al-Rajhi Banking and Investment Corporation, which runs nearly four hundred branch offices in Saudi Arabia and abroad. Founded in 1987, it is one of the richest banks in the kingdom, contributing to charities like the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which funneled money to bin Laden and other militant Saudis.
No one could do anything about Na’if, including King Fahd. Na’if ran the Interior Ministry like his own personal reserve. As Fahd’s full brother, Na’if is a “protected” prince and can’t be fired, even as he steps up his private war against the United States and extorts money from militant Wahhabis. I often wondered why Na’if hated the U.S. so much. [text omitted]
Louis Freeh has never gone on the record about Khobar and Na’if, but I suspect he wasn’t surprised. He’d seen worse. By the mid-1990s, Qatar was hosting ten al Qaeda terrorists now on the most-wanted list. When Freeh received a rock-solid report showing conclusively that al Qaeda’s most lethal operative, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was among those being harbored by the Qatar government, Freeh sent a démarche to the Qatari minister of foreign affairs, asking that Qatar honor its commitment to turn Muhammad over to the FBI.
Freeh particularly wanted to put away Muhammad because he was the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the man who planned the truck-bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Muhammad had also planned to blow up eleven American airliners over the Pacific. He even practiced on a Philippines airliner, killing a young Japanese passenger on a flight in late 1994. One of Muhammad’s associates arrested in the Philippines credits Muhammad with being an early backer of hijacking airplanes and running them into U.S. buildings including the CIA headquarters. Freeh’s request to the Qatari minister leaves no doubt that he considered Muhammad a psychotic murderer.
“Muhammad’s suspected involvement in terrorist plots clearly threatens U.S. interests,” Freeh wrote in a letter shown to me by a high-ranking Arab intelligence official. “His activities in Qatar threaten your government’s interests as well. Indeed, you indicated during our meeting that he may be in the process of manufacturing an explosive device that would potentially endanger the lives of the citizens of Qatar. In addition, you indicated that Muhammad has over twenty false passports at his disposal.”
Qatar’s response? Although Muhammad was an employee of the Q
atari government at the time (ironically, he was working in the public water works), the administration claimed they could not find him. In fact, they secretly whisked Muhammad out of the country, keeping an FBI squad cooling its heels in a Doha hotel. Freeh’s dismay must have turned to anger when he found out that Qatar had dumped $23,938,994.20 between 1997 and 1999 into a Washington law firm close to the White House and another $689,805.16 into a K Street public-relations firm to buff up its image and cover its flanks while it served as a holding tank for some of the world’s most dangerous people. The icing on the cake was when the American ambassador in Doha - the man charged with convincing the Qataris to turn over Muhammad - later went to work for the Qataris. Muhammad himself won time to start masterminding 9/11.
What does Qatar have to do with Saudi Arabia, aside from the fact that it shares a border with the kingdom and has a population similarly weighted toward a militant, fanatical interpretation of Islam? Consider this: When Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was run to ground in Pakistan in March 2003, he was in the company of Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, a Saudi conduit for the September 11 hijackers drawing from accounts in the United Arab Emirates. According to a Gulf security official I talked to, Hawsawi crossed over from the kingdom to carry out the transfers to the hijackers. In other words, there are no hard-and-fast borders to this terror network. Osama bin Laden flies no national flag over his cave, wherever that might be. Anger against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to - the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, of course - and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the principal backer: Saudi Arabia.
The Clinton administration, by the way, didn’t give a damn that its own FBI director got stood up in Qatar. It didn’t even complain to the Qatari foreign minister, who wandered in and out of the White House as if he worked there. I was once asked to vacate the office of Al Gore’s national security adviser so the vice president could meet with the foreign minister when he showed up unannounced.
But Na’if alone wasn’t the problem. The House of Sa’ud and the kingdom it rules basically hit the mute button beginning in the mid-1990s, and it hasn’t let up since. In 1996 the Saudi government simply declined Sudan’s offer to turn over Osama bin Laden. Riyadh’s explanation? Bin Ladin was too popular in Saudi Arabia; his arrest would incite a revolution. Since September 11, not a single indictment or even a useful lead has come out of Saudi Arabia. So thorough has been the lockdown that the FBI has not been allowed to interview suspects, including the families of the fifteen Saudi hijackers. Long after September 11, Saudi Arabia refused to provide advance manifests for flights coming into the U.S., a basic and potentially fatal breach of security.
If Saudi Arabia were even remotely a free and open country, the U.S. press might be able to tell us why Na’if is at war with America; but with few exceptions, American journalists are not issued visas to visit the kingdom. The few who visit find themselves closely controlled by the secret police. Don’t look for much illumination from the supposedly new and improved FBI, either. The bureau’s Riyadh office is, or at least was until recently, staffed with two Muslim agents, but not because they had special access to the Arab street. The FBI was far more interested in demonstrating how “in touch” it was with Saudi sensitivities. Perish the thought that we might risk insulting the Al Sa’ud by sending an infidel to watch them.
FOR MOST AMERICANS, September 11 was both a national horror and a geopolitical awakening. It was almost impossible to absorb that fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis, the citizens of a country we’d always been told was our best ally in the Middle East, after Israel. But in the fall of 2002, when Saudi Arabia started to lead the Arab campaign against a war in Iraq, mainly because it was worried about its own stability, Americans began to come around to the fact that they’d been lied to about Saudi Arabia. A decade earlier, during the Persian Gulf War, the Saudis opened their door to U.S. forces. In 2002 America found itself begging Qatar to provide a communications base for our invading forces. As if Americans needed more evidence, perhaps two-thirds of al Qaeda prisoners being held in the Camp Delta prison facility at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba - “the worst of the worst,” according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - were said to be Saudi nationals.
Every day seemed to bring damning new revelations about Saudi Arabia, many connected to the royal family: The wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States had handed out money that found its way to two of the 9/11 hijackers. A raid on the Hamburg apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers had turned up the business card of a Saudi diplomat. The two hijackers who arrived in Los Angeles were met by a Saudi working for a company contracted to the Ministry of Defense. Other Saudis fed the ATM machines for the hijackers. When NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, founded by Prince Salman, they found before-and-after photos of the destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of the World Trade Center (when it still stood), and of the U.S.S. Cole, as well as files on the use of crop-duster planes and materials for forging official U.S. identity cards. In November 2002 the Saudi embassy in Washington gave the finger to the State Department and federal law officials, providing a new passport for the wife of a suspected al Qaeda sympathizer and slipping her and her five children out of the U.S. after she was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury.
As the facts against Riyadh mounted, the Saudis couldn’t refute them. Instead, they reacted heatedly. In a rare press appearance at the kingdom’s Washington embassy, Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to the crown, complained: “We have been assailed as the kernel of evil, the breeding ground of terrorism. Our faith has been maligned in ways that I did not expect Americans to ever do.” In the meantime, Na’if continued to pretend that Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with the attacks. A year and a half later, there still hadn’t been a single Saudi arrest that helped us get to the bottom of September 11.
Frankly, none of this should come as a surprise. The Saudi judicial system looks as if it were designed by Ghengis Khan. Saudi Arabia tops the world in public beheadings. (The venue for many of them is a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square.) The kingdom’s secondary schools and universities have become the West Point of global terrorism. Its public-decency police force, the muttawa, has zero interest in stopping Saudis from plotting righteous murder abroad. It tends to more important matters, like forcing store owners to shut down during prayer times and beating women on the arms and legs when their robes are too short. In March 2002 it blocked the exits from a girl’s school on fire in Mecca because the girls weren’t properly covered; fourteen died. Foreign workers are virtually without rights in Saudi Arabia. No one in the kingdom, national or visitor, can practice any religion but Islam. Anyone caught putting up a Christmas wreath is lashed.
Even the U.S. State Department had to admit things weren’t so good in the kingdom when it came to religion. It considered putting the kingdom on a blacklist of nations that restrict religious freedom, including Iran, Iraq, China, Burma, Sudan, and North Korea. The department’s “International Religious Freedom Report for 2002” cited detentions of Christians, confiscation or censoring of Bibles, and harassment of Christians by the country’s religious police. In the end, though, it just couldn’t bring itself to do anything so extreme.
Things are even worse than they seem. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have what we would call a rule of law. Look inside a Saudi passport: It states that the holder “belongs” to the royal family. A Saudi commoner is chattel, a piece of property no different from an Al Sa’ud’s Jeddah palace or his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. There are no rights in the kingdom, just as there isn’t a parliament or a constitution.
Things might be better if Saudi Arabia were some romantic kingdom ruled by a wise, benevolent king and a royal family with a sense of noblesse oblige. But it isn’t. Starting at the top, King Fahd is close to brain-dead, inca
pacitated by a 1995 stroke. This became clear late that year when Fahd shit in his pool during physical therapy, in front of his family. Crown Prince ‘Abdallah supposedly fills in for Fahd, his half brother, but he has no real power. He is mistrusted and despised by the senior princes - the cabinet ministers - and his authority is checked at every opportunity.
Fahd’s favorite wife, Jawhara al-Ibrahim, and her spoiled, megalomanic son ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz - Azouzi, or “deary,” as Fahd calls him - actually run Saudi Arabia. Jawhara alone has twenty-four-hour-a-day access to Fahd. She decides who will see him and who won’t, which decrees he will see and which he won’t. For all practical purposes, she sets the general course of Saudi internal and external policy. For all we know, she states how much oil will be pumped or completely cut off.
Dementia, palace intrigues, and jealousy are only the start of the Al Sa’ud story. The Al Sa’ud are as violent and vengeful as any Mafia family. The first Saudi to write a book critical of the kingdom was kidnapped in Beirut and presumably murdered in the early 1970s. I learned, after I left the CIA, that in the mid-1990s, Na’if was behind at least two attempts on the life of Muhammad al-Masari, the leader of the London-based Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights. Surely that ought to be reason enough for al-Masari to join others in taking up arms against the Al Sa’ud - Osama bin Laden, for example. In another case, ‘Abd-al-Karim Naqshabandi, a Syrian who irritated a member of the royal family, was beheaded on the streets of Riyadh in 1996, despite the pleas of human-rights activists from around the world. The charge: sorcery. Anything can be a capital crime in Saudi Arabia if it serves the interest of a Saudi don.
Like royals anywhere the Al Sa’ud are enormously resistant to change. They don’t want to admit to the rot in the Kingdom. In particular, they don’t want to talk about the fact that Fahd’s stroke has set the country adrift, allowing corrupt princes to make fortunes in illegal ventures, from selling visas and alcohol to stealing property. They also do not want to talk about the fact that the importation of foreign labor has resulted in large numbers of young Saudis out of work, encouraging them to spend their time in the mosque being indoctrinated for jihad and righteous murder.
