by Robert Baer
For us in the West, the more important part of Ibn Taymiyah’s peculiar take on Islam was that Islamic militants drew on his writings to justify the murder of Christian civilians. Since Christians supported the Crusaders, the thinking went, they deserved death. It was also the obligation of a good Muslim to die for the cause. In his book Murder on the Nile, J. Bowyer Bell quotes from Ibn Taymiyah’s writings: “Death of the martyrs for the unification of all the people in the cause of God and His word is the happiest, best, easiest, and most virtuous of deaths.” Ibn Taymiyah was the source of authority that called for assassinating Anwar Sadat. Even a Muslim deserves death if he has made common cause with Islam’s enemies, and Sadat’s Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, proved he had done so. Ibn Taymiyah’s fingerprints were all over September 11, too. The people in the World Trade Center deserved to die because they paid the taxes that went to sending aid to Israel that was used to buy the weapons that killed Muslims.
Most important, Shawish taught me that Muslim Brothers weren’t alone in their devotion to Ibn Taymiyah. He reviewed the history of how, when Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab started preaching in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century, he drew heavily on the sage of Damascus. Ever since, Ibn Taymiyah has been the mainstay of Wahhabi Islam, later joined by the Brothers’ radical interpretation of Islam. No wonder the two of them got along so well: It was like the Brothers were coming home.
MY LESSONS with Shawish were strictly off the books. The CIA had sent me to Beirut to look for the hostages kidnapped by Iran. The first taken was David Dodge, the acting president of the American University in Beirut. He was kidnapped in 1982, but scores more were snatched in the following years. President Reagan had taken a personal interest in their fate. More than that, the hostages’ captor, Iran, had obsessed the Reagan administration.
In November 1979 Iran had unofficially declared war on the United States when partisans of Ayatollah Khomeini occupied our embassy in Tehran. On April 18, 1983, Iran blew up our embassy in Beirut. On October 23, 1983, it killed 241 Marines with a truck bomb, and Reagan was forced to pull American forces out of Lebanon. On December 12, 1983, Iran struck again, bombing the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. On March 16, 1984, it kidnapped Bill Buckley, Beirut’s CIA chief, effectively closing down American intelligence operations in a city that used to be our main listening post for the Middle East. In other words, in four short years, Iran had run the United States out of two countries - Iran and Lebanon. That’s why Beirut was preoccupied with the hostages and had no time for Shawish or Sunni fundamentalism. Obviously, I’d figured this out, but I wouldn’t understand how distracted the Reagan administration was until I was given a front-row seat to one of the silliest operations the Central Intelligence Agency ever ran.
It was a typical Beirut day for me. Before the sun was up, I headed to the tennis court for an hour of hitting the ball with the club pro. Perched in a pine grove on a hill north of Beirut, the tennis club had an unimpeded view of the Mediterranean. You’d think you were on the French Riviera… until about seven a.m., when the first Syrian 155-mm shell of the morning would whistle over on its way to one of the Palestinian refugee camps south of Beirut. The shells were a daily reminder that Arab solidarity was a myth, albeit one that seemed almost impossible to destroy.
By eight I was back at my apartment, sitting on my balcony with my first espresso of the day. My Motorola radio, which I was supposed to keep within reach twenty-four hours a day, crackled alive. “Lone Ranger, Lone Ranger.” It was Bill [text omitted] my boss.
Bill had been in Beirut a little less than a year. When he first stepped off the Blackhawk at the embassy’s helo pad and fixed me with his Marine “you cross me and I’ll break your neck” glare, I figured my Beirut days were numbered. As promised, things didn’t go well at first. Morning one, Bill tore up one of my cables, barking that I could either tighten my prose or catch the next helicopter out of Beirut. Mornings two and three weren’t much better, but then something clicked between us. Maybe it was my knowledge of Hizballah; maybe it was Bill’s loyalty to anyone under him who worked hard.
“Lone Ranger,” Bill growled again. “Get your ass in the office - now.”
Bill was sitting in the dark when I arrived. The electricity was off, and for some reason, the generator hadn’t kicked in. Between the one-foot steel antirocket walls, the Mylar-coated window, and the filthy curtains, which might have been new in 1947, you could barely tell it was day. The one difference between Shawish’s bunker on the Green Line and this lair was Bill’s Coleman lantern.
Bill was sitting at his desk, looking, as usual, Buddhalike. (He’d put on about fifty pounds since his Marine days.) Two Delta Force shooters stood at parade rest in front of his desk. I knew both of them from the practice range. They could empty their Glock 9-mm pistols on a target from fifty feet and manage to clump every round into a hole about the size of a quarter. I will call them Mack and Striker.
“Now that Baer has graced us with his presence, we can start,” Bill said, moving his lantern to see us better. Every other chair in Bill’s office was occupied with flack vests, rations, and ammunition, so I stood with the shooters.
“Do you know how fucking stupid Washington is?” Bill asked.
He started his business day the same way every day, usually after he finished reading the morning cable traffic from headquarters. I knew better than to respond. Striker and Mack didn’t say anything, either. Delta shooters usually keep their politics to themselves.
Bill started off on a Washington riff but then suddenly changed his mind and started talking about an old hijacking. On June 11, 1985, Fawaz Younis and a couple of bangers from his southern-Beirut-suburbs neighborhood hijacked a Royal Jordanian airliner preparing to take off from the Beirut airport. After subduing the guards, Younis demanded that the pilot fly to Tunis, where he intended to address the Arab League. When that didn’t work, he settled for off-loading the passengers and blowing up the airplane where it sat.
Although no one died during the hijacking and it didn’t involve an American airplane, two Americans had been on board. Technically, that put the hijacking under American legal jurisdiction. The Department of Justice indicted Younis and issued a sealed arrest warrant.
No one would have paid any attention to Younis or the DOJ’s arrest warrant - it was unclear whether he was a terrorist or just insane - if not for a confluence of events. The CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center still hadn’t had a clearly identified success, especially one that it could make public. Meanwhile, the bloody, spectacular terrorist events mounted, and the White House was looking for a success, any success, to hold up in response. Coincidentally, the CIA found out that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s office in Nicosia was running a narcotics source named Jamal Hamdan, who happened to be Younis’s friend. It took CTC about five seconds to concoct an operation to snatch Younis.
It went like clockwork. An unarmed Younis was lured onto a pleasure boat in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, arrested, and sent back to the United States. You could almost hear the champagne corks popping from Nicosia to Langley to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The FBI was delighted, too. It got one of its first international collars, and the fact that female agents took part in the arrest helped the bureau pretend it was as politically correct as the next bureaucracy in Washington. Even State was happy. By arresting Younis away from Cyprus in international waters, it avoided irritating another client. The Washington Post and The New York Times got to fill a few extra columns with a little real-life drama. It was win-win-win all the way around. Heck, the hijacked Americans are probably still dining out on the story.
The only person who wasn’t happy, it seemed, was Bill [text omitted] “Do you know how fucking stupid Washington is?” he asked again.
I already knew about Fawaz Younis’s arrest. I’d followed it in cable traffic as well as in the press. I assumed Striker and Mack knew something about it, too, but since they didn’t say any
thing, there was no way of knowing for sure.
“Now they’re sending this son of a bitch here for us to run. I don’t like it, but I don’t have a choice.”
Bill told us that Washington had decided Jamal Hamdan had done so well in setting the trap for Fawaz Younis that it would turn him loose in Beirut to find the hostages. It didn’t matter that Hamdan didn’t have the slightest idea who was holding them or even where to start looking. This was a headquarters decision. Bill could comply or go back to the Marines.
“So why do we have to run him?” I asked. Cyprus could have put him on a plane directly to Beirut International Airport, which was in the west, where the hostages were being held.
Bill grinned like the Grinch who stole Christmas as he handed me a sheaf of Arabic documents: murder indictments from the Lebanese state prosecutor’s office. When I looked closer, I noticed they all bore the name of Jamal Hamdan - the same Jamal Hamdan the Beirut [text omitted]was supposed to handle. The last person he was accused of killing was his sister. He’d put a twelve-gauge shotgun to her head and blown it off. She’d apparently dated a guy Jamal hadn’t approved of.
“The reason we have to take the son of a bitch here in the east is because he can’t go to West Beirut. He’d be immediately arrested for murder,” Bill answered.
As it turned out, Jamal had conveniently killed all of his victims in West Beirut. Although the Christians in East Beirut knew he was a murderer, they would never honor the arrest warrant of a Muslim prosecutor. Legalisms aside, killing Muslims was the point in East Beirut in those days.
Bill turned to the Delta shooters. “Baer’s going to run Hamdan. But you don’t take orders from Baer; you take them from me. And right now all I want you to do is pick Hamdan up from the helicopter and follow Baer to a safe house. Hamdan is not to leave the safe house. If he as much as touches the doorknob like he’s going to leave, or attempts to climb out of the window, shoot and kill him.”
Ah, finally some emotion from the Delta boys! Until then they’d probably thought Bill had gone soft since becoming a CIA spook. Now he was starting to make sense.
That night I didn’t get any sleep. Hamdan was restless and paced around the safe house like a caged animal. Every time he got within a foot of the front door, Striker would reach for the Glock under his vest, eyeing the spot in the back of Jamal’s head where he planned to double-tap him. I hurriedly steered Hamdan away from the door. I could just imagine the cable exchange with Washington.
Over the next two days, I drove Hamdan from one public telephone to another so he could call his contacts in West Beirut. As Bill had predicted, Hamdan never produced a reliable piece of information on the hostages. By day three, we had all had enough. Bill called the head of European Command, to whom Beirut’s Blackhawks technically belonged. I’ll never forget his bellowing at whatever the four star’s name was: “It’s none of your goddamned business why I need the helicopters. The only thing you have to think about is making sure they’re on the LZ at 1800.” Indeed, two Blackhawks put down at the LZ exactly on time, and that was the last we saw of Jamal Hamdan.
He was resettled in the United States along with most of his extended family. As for Bill, he never let up in his battle against Washington. He went from one hardship post to another until headquarters discovered that he was a great secret weapon against the State Department and sent him as chief to anywhere the CIA was having a problem with an ambassador.
TODAY it sounds like a Monty Python skit. But it was while we were doing these things - chasing down Fawaz Younis and running scum like Jamal Hamdan - that we missed the whole phenomenon of militant Sunni Islam. The attempts against Nasser and Asad, Sadat’s assassination, Hama: They were looked at as isolated events, strictly local problems. No one connected the dots. The shadow war against Iran had us facing entirely in the wrong direction.
The destruction of Hama was the best example. Washington put the blame for it squarely on Asad’s shoulders - an act of pure inhumanity ordered by a brutal dictator. The reasoning on the banks of the pristine Potomac was that if only Damascus had a friendly, pro-Western, democratic government, Hama never would have happened. But no one thought it through. If elections had been held in Syria at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood would have won.
Dig a little deeper, and you’d have no trouble finding some Washington “never heard a shot fired in anger” think-tank hawk who looked at Hama as a good thing. Leveling the place was sure to inspire the Syrian Brothers to wreak revenge on Asad’s Alawites. And how bad could that be? The Alawites might have called themselves Arab Ba’th socialists, but as far as the hawks were concerned, they were Arab communists. Considering the Alawites had their Soviet-built SS-21s trained on Tel Aviv, they were dangerous communists, at that. The feeling in this group was simple: The fewer Alawites, the better.
This kind of thinking turned out to be criminally shortsighted. Long before the World Trade Center towers fell, anyone who looked at the facts objectively understood that the Brotherhood was ready to blow up in our face. Yet even after the massacre at Aleppo and the takeover of Hama, no one in Washington thought to yell, “Fire in the hole!”
On October 26, 1988, a Brother named Hashim ‘Abassi was rounded up in the so-called Autumn Leaves arrests in Neuss, Germany. ‘Abassi was part of a cell of Islamic militants that included his brother-in-law and the group’s leader, Muhammad Hafiz Dalkimoni, who were planning to blow up five civilian jetliners. Although ‘Abassi and most of the other Autumn Leaves conspirators were behind bars when Pan Am 103 exploded, the investigators’ initial hypothesis was that they still had something to do with it. The lead was dropped when the investigators settled on two Libyans as the sole culprits. Today we know this was a mistake. If someone had bothered to look into ‘Abassi and his Syrian Muslim Brotherhood cell, we might have been led to the Hamburg cell.
September 11 was almost a class reunion for the Syrian Muslim Brothers. One of the key figures in the German apparatus, Mamoun Darkazanli, fled from Syria to Germany after Hama. Although Darkazanli denied advance knowledge of 9/11, he admitted to providing help to three of the hijackers. A former Syrian intelligence officer familiar with Darkanzali told me that he had participated in the attack on the Aleppo artillery school in 1979. Another key Muslim Brotherhood player in September 11, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, likely arranged for the hijackers’ training in bin Laden’s Afghani camps. A third, ‘Abd-al-Matin Tatari, ran a Brotherhood front company in Hamburg. Tatari’s son was close to Muhammad Atta and the the Hamburg cell members. Two Syrian Brothers in Spain probably provided support to the hijackers. The details are beyond the scope of this book, but the point is that although Washington disliked Asad almost as much as the Brothers did, Asad was definitely on to something when he decided the Syrian Brothers were bad news. Hama and Allepo weren’t merely local problems, as we’d been told.
JUST AS WE’D MISSED the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, so we missed it in Kuwait. We were looking the other way and didn’t see Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, one of the strangest and most lethal insects to crawl out from under the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Born in Kuwait in 1965, KSM (as he’s known in the alphabet soup of the intelligence world) was the son of two immigrants from Balachistan, a remote, uncivilized province of Pakistan. His parents had moved to Kuwait hoping to cash in on the oil boom. Instead, they ended up in a desert grease pit called Fahaheel, where they were treated the same way as all the other South Asians living in the Gulf - like coolies.
The one political outlet KSM’s family was given, it took. His father became a local mosque leader; his mother, a corpse washer, which in Islam is a religious position. The sons would take Islam one step further, turning to its dark side. One of KSM’s brothers joined the Brotherhood in the 1980s, when he was at the university. Apparently under his influence, KSM also joined.
The Brotherhood was a sanctioned organization in Kuwait, just as it was in Saudi Arabia. In fact, it was encouraged. When Yasi
r Arafat was forced to leave Egypt because of his association with the Brotherhood, the Kuwaitis happily took him and the other Palestinian Brothers. That burnished the royal family’s Palestinian and Islamic credentials. When Arafat moved on, the accommodating Kuwaitis backed the Islamic Association of Palestinian Students as a recruiting vehicle for Hamas.
Naturally, the Kuwait Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t even on Washington’s radar screen. Like Hama and Sadat’s assassination, it was another local problem, not Washington’s concern. Let the Kuwaitis sort it out. Besides, this was the early 1980s, right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Keeping in mind that the Kuwaiti Shi’a - almost a third of Kuwait’s population - were believed to be sympathetic to Iran, who had time to worry about the Brothers? Christ, our oil fields were in range of the Iranian and Iraqi big guns. You could even hear them from Kuwait City.
In 1983, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad applied for a visa to study at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, no one paid him the least attention. He was one more Middle Easterner hoping for a U.S. engineering degree, no doubt expecting to return and work in the oil industry. (The same thing would happen in Khartoum when the visa officer didn’t recognize the blind sheikh ‘Umar ‘Abd-al-Rahman. It didn’t matter that his name and face had been splattered across the front pages of the world’s press as the man who’d handed down the fatwa to assassinate Sadat.)
Like his brothers, KSM found his way to Afghanistan, where he hooked up with Sayyaf, the Afghan Muslim Brother and ally of Saudi Arabia. It was in Peshawar that he met Osama bin Laden and all the other jihadi fanatics from whom he would learn the tools of terrorism. There was nothing like ambushing a Soviet armor column to test your mettle, see who would die for Allah and who wouldn’t. Presumably, it was then that bin Laden came to trust KSM enough to commit mass murder on September 11.
