by Robert Baer
Needless to say, the CIA in Pakistan saw none of this coming. The White House orders had been clear: Send the bastards all the arms and ammunition they need, but let them do the fighting and stay out of their hair. Anyhow, the Afghans didn’t need training in murder. They learned that when they climbed out of the crib. Basically, the Afghan war for the CIA was purely a logistics exercise. It didn’t even have much contact with the resistance groups, which meant that the CIA and Washington were as blind as the sheikh, and the Muslim Brotherhood was its Invisible Man. We didn’t see it because we didn’t want to.
This approach was never so evident as in Saudi Arabia. When Nasser closed down the Brotherhood in 1954, the militants fled to Saudi Arabia, where they were welcomed with open arms. The Brothers knew their Ibn Taymiyah; they could teach the Qur’an; and they would work for pennies. For the radical Wahhabis, this was a match made in heaven. Before long, Egyptian Brothers were occupying many of the important chairs in the religious faculties of Saudi Arabia’s universities and madrasahs. By 1961 the Brotherhood had become so entrenched in the kingdom that it convinced King Sa’ud to fund an Islamic university in the holy city of Medina to replace Cairo’s al-Azhar, the historical center of Islamic learning. The Brothers claimed that Nasser had destroyed al-Azhar.
Saudi Arabia even pimped for the Brothers. In the summer of 1971 King Faysal arranged for a delegation of Brothers to travel from Saudi Arabia to try to reconcile with Sadat. The head of the Brotherhood delegation, Sa’id Ramadan, was on the Saudi payroll as director of a Geneva-based organization called the Centre Islamique. Although Sadat and the Brothers never reached an agreement, Saudi Arabia had shown its hand. Egypt’s most famous journalist, Mohamed Heikel, chronicled the meeting in his book Autumn of Fury.
By the early 1970s no one doubted that Saudi Arabia had become the Brothers’ rear base. All along, Washington pretended the Brotherhood didn’t exist, and it wasn’t like folks there didn’t know what it was. Call Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brothers what you want, but by today’s definition, they were terrorists. Al-Banna’s slogan for the Brotherhood left no doubt:
God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Qur’an our constitution, jihad our way and dying for God’s cause our supreme objective.
Those could have been the final words of the September 11 hijackers.
TO SEE THE EXPLOSIVE EFFECT of mixing Brothers and Wahhabis, look at Osama bin Laden’s trajectory into militant Islam. As a student at the King ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz University, bin Laden fell under the influence of two Muslim Brothers: ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam and Muhammad Qutb. ‘Azzam, a Jordanian Palestinian, had been recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood as a student at Cairo’s al-Azhar University. Soon he would become known as the “Amir of Jihad,” and by then the only country that would take him was Saudi Arabia, which gave him a teaching job at the university. ‘Azzam and bin Laden would spend time together in Peshawar, Pakistan, during the Afghan war.
Qutb was the brother of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ most extremist militant, Sayyid Qutb. Sayyid did more to radicalize the Brotherhood than anyone. Like some latter-day Ibn Taymiyah, he sold the Brothers on the idea that all Christians and Jews were infidels who deserved to be killed. Egypt executed Sayyid in 1966, but his doctrine lived on. One of bin Laden’s brother-in-laws was a fund-raiser for the Muslim Brotherhood.
As far as I can see, the reason Washington wore these blinders - especially to Saudi Arabia, which nurtured the viper at its breast for all these years - was twofold. One, the Brothers were on our side in the cold war, offering us a cheap, no-American-casualties way to fight the Soviet Union. Two, the Saudis were banking our oil. As with any other addiction, we were in no position to challenge the pusher. It felt great until the withdrawal on September 11.
By then, though, addiction had become the wrong metaphor. The Brotherhood was more like a cancer, well established in its host organ but treatable so long as it hadn’t spread its tentacles throughout the body. The question was: Had it metastasized? I had begun searching for that answer almost a decade earlier, in as grim a corner of the planet as I ever hope to see.
9. Trouble in Paradise
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan - November 1992
THE FADED BLONDE built like a Siberian woodstove was fuming. Every time she tried to escape from behind the Aeroflot counter, a knot of stubborn, broad-faced Kyrgyz peasants blocked her way. With the last flight to Osh scheduled to depart in twenty minutes, they weren’t about to move until she handed over their boarding passes. They didn’t care that the flight would probably be hours late. They didn’t care that handing out boarding passes wasn’t her job. And they certainly didn’t care that it was her Aeroflot-sanctioned tea break. One thing the Kyrgyz had learned from living on the remote edge of the Soviet empire: Passive resistance was the only way to get your way.
Catching sight of me on the other side of her counter, impatiently waving my own ticket to Osh, didn’t improve the Aeroflot lady’s mood. My Levi’s, T-shirt, and North Face parka pegged me as one more pain-in-the-ass tourist setting off to discover Central Asia. My “first-class” Intourist ticket - the “upgrade” cost the rough equivalent of a New York City subway token - didn’t make the slightest impression on her. Neither did my shiny black American diplomatic passport. She pointed a fat finger at a broken banquette of chairs in the corner of the terminal, which I think was supposed to be Intourist’s exclusive waiting lounge. “Wait like everyone else,” she said.
I suppose she had seen her share of problems with Western tourists. Ever since Kyrgyzstan opened up, climbers, trekkers, and hunters regularly got lost in the Tien Shan Mountains. Aeroflot or the Kyrgyz air force then had to risk one of their helicopters to rescue them. Then there were the brigands - basmachi, as they’re called in Russian - who would sometimes kidnap tourists. When that happened, the Kyrgyz army had to deploy troops to free the hostages and drive the basmachi back up into the high mountains.
One of the stranger cases I’d heard about involved a car full of Dutch who tried to retrace the ancient Silk Route from Osh to a dusty oasis town in western China called Kashgar. They had all the necessary Chinese visas, but the Chinese guards on the Kyrgyz border apparently had never seen a visa before. Or maybe they were suspicious of the bicycles tied to the top of the Dutchmen’s car. Anyhow, the border guards wouldn’t let them in. An appeal to Beijing wasn’t possible; there were no telephone connections to Beijing. The Dutch had no choice but to turn back. Before they did, though, they slammed shut the giant iron gate that separated China from Kyrgyzstan and locked it with a bicycle chain. No one bothered to cut it for months, or so went the story.
If pressed, the Aeroflot lady probably would have told me I had no business going to Osh. For most of its modern existence, in Czarist and Soviet times alike, Osh was strictly verboten to foreigners. It was a “strategic site,” and “diplomats” like me could mean only trouble. It would take a Soviet hand to explain the logic behind putting a hole like Osh off limits, or why the Soviet Union was so paranoid about central Asia. I suppose it was a hangover from the Great Game - the war of shadows Britain and Russia fought in the nineteenth century for control of the region. Russia was convinced that Britain intended to undermine its empire through Central Asia, and Britain thought Russia was trying to do the same thing in India.
Britain didn’t do anything to help Russia get over its paranoia. During the nineteenth century, the British infiltrated a few missions north of the Amu Darya, the shallow, muddy river that separates Russian Central Asia from Afghanistan. Most of those who crossed into places like Osh stayed a little while, patted themselves on the back for having played and survived the Great Game, and beat a retreat south for the more refined comforts of the subcontinent. Ultimately, the Russians would learn they had more to fear from Islam than they did from the British.
The first serious Islamic uprising against the Soviets in Central Asia occurred in 1918. Trading in a Czarist for a communist yoke was definitely a bad deal for Ce
ntral Asia’s Muslims. A month after their October 1917 victory far to the north, the Bolsheviks sent a detachment to seize the important regional capital of Tashkent. The new commissars began by requisitioning all the food they could lay their hands on and seizing the cotton crop in the name of the people’s republic. A famine soon followed that would kill as many as a million Central Asians. In February 1918 Bolshevik troops put down a revolt in the ancient Uzbek caravan city of Kokand, sacking and slaughtering as they went, and the basmachi revolt was on.
While the Bolsheviks were occupied by consolidating their victory elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the uprising spread. Victory followed on victory. At its height, the rebellion counted maybe twenty thousand soldiers in its ranks, most of them peasant fighters, all of them Muslims. The end, though, seemed foreordained. The communists outnumbered the basmachi; they had heavy weapons; and after the White Russians were defeated, the rebels got the Reds’ full attention. By 1920 the basmachi had been driven back into the mountains of Tajikistan. That’s when Enver Pasha showed up.
Turkey’s minister of war during World War I, Enver Pasha fled to Berlin after the defeat of the Central Powers, and then went to Moscow at Lenin’s invitation. Lenin wanted to use the charismatic Turk to draw Central Asia’s Muslims into the Soviet fold, but as it turned out, Pasha had a grander vision: a pan-Turkic state that would stretch from the Straits of Bosporus to Mongolia. He was only thirty-two.
In February 1922, Pasha captured Dushanbe, the capital of modern Tajikistan. By the end of spring, he had taken control of virtually all of the emirate of Bokhara. In July 1922 the Soviets were forced to react to Pasha’s treachery and sent a division south to stop him. It worked. He was killed in battle on August 4 of that year. But the basmachi wouldn’t be completely snuffed out until 1934. Some of the rebels, it was thought, holed up in the remote mountain valleys of Tajikistan. Most took refuge in Afghanistan. More than a few slipped as far away as Saudi Arabia. Some took up residence in Mecca and became dyed-in-the-wool Wahhabis.
Islamic fundamentalism wouldn’t threaten Russian domination of Central Asia again until 1979, but that was a dandy. For millennia, Afghanistan was the main corridor of East-West trade, which meant that it was also subject to almost constant invasion and occupation. Afghanistan’s current troubles started in 1973, when a military coup ushered in the nation’s first republic, momentarily ending centuries of foreign and tribal rule. Five years later, Soviet-backed leftists seized control of the government in a bloody coup, and the new government immediately signed economic and military treaties with Moscow.
It didn’t take long for the Islamic world to react. In March 1979 Muslim fundamentalists seized control of the 17th Division of the Afghan army, headquartered in Herat. The revolt immediately started to spread, promising to infect the rest of Afghanistan. Equally threatening for the Soviets, the new Islamic regime in Tehran seemed ready to fuel the uprising. A militant Islamic government in Kabul was the Soviets’ worst nightmare.
They panicked. During an emergency late-night meeting on March 17, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko reported to the politburo: “The insurgents infiltrating into the territory of Herat Province from Pakistan and Iran have joined forces with a domestic counter-revolution. The latter is especially comprised of religious fanatics. The leaders of the reactionary masses are also linked in large part with the religious figures.” In other words, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly face-to-face with an Islamic jihad. Memories of the basmachi revolt hung in the air like a putrid corpse. No one needed to be reminded that that revolt had nearly undone the October revolution, or that the Soviet Union’s mountainous border with Afghanistan couldn’t contain an Islamic tidal wave rolling in from the south.
The situation deteriorated by the day. When it appeared that the government in Kabul couldn’t hold on any longer, the Red Army invaded. The first troops crossed the border on Christmas Eve 1979. For the Soviet Union, it turned out to be a mistake of biblical proportions. All its money, soldiers, T-72 tanks, and Mi-24 Hind gunships counted for nothing in stopping Afghans with faith on their side.
Ten years later, as the Soviet Union itself was starting to implode, the last Soviet soldier was driven from Afghanistan. As the politburo had feared, the chaos in Afghanistan sloshed across the border like a backed-up sewer. In 1990 ethnic riots broke out between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Osh. More than a thousand people died. The three Soviet republics that shared the Fergana Valley - Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - put their armed forces on a permanent state of alert, knowing the trouble would spread. In 1991 a twenty-four-year-old Uzbek named Tahir Yuldashev led an Islamic uprising in Namangan, about halfway between Osh and Tashkent. Islamic rebels paraded around thieves and prostitutes, back to front, on donkeys, beating them with whips in front of the mosques. When the uprising was brutally supressed, Yuldashev fled to Afghanistan and formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Until the American attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, the IMU conducted a sporadic terrorist campaign against Tashkent, infiltrating cadres through the Fergana.
FOR WASHINGTON, an Islamic resurgence in Central Asia would have been of little interest except for one thing: the region’s enormous oil and gas reserves, second only to the Gulf’s. The bulk of the oil lies under Kazakstan, while the gas is under Turkmenistan. At an estimated 260 billion barrels of oil reserves, and with greater gas reserves than all of North America, the Caspian region could keep the U.S. warm and lighted, and our factories humming, for a long time. The only problem was getting it out. Kazakstan and Turkmenistan are out in the middle of the remote, inhospitable, and landlocked Eurasian steppe.
Under the Soviet Union, Central Asia’s energy was exported west to Russia and Eastern Europe via an intricate web of pipelines. That had been the rub with Central Asian gas and oil. Nearly all of the pipe it traveled through passed through Russia. The Russians could and did shut down exports at will, which gave them a stranglehold over the countries that owned the energy. Energy has value only when there’s a delivery system. Otherwise, it’s better left in the ground.
As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Washington decided it could turn Central Asia’s energy into a strategic asset. Why not bypass the Russian pipeline system by finding alternative export routes? Doing so would pry Russian’s dead hand off the Central Asian states and make them economically independent. In no time, democracy would bloom. Even better in some ways, with the Caspian’s 260 billion barrels of oil fully and freely exportable; we wouldn’t need Middle Eastern oil. Let Saddam invade Kuwait again. Who cared? For that matter, let him invade Saudi Arabia. On paper, it was a sure winner, if only new pipelines could be worked out.
The Great Game seemed to be back on, but this time with the U.S. squared off against the two largest regional powers: Russia and Iran. Naturally, American oil companies queued up to play. Chevron and Mobil, the biggest participants, bought giant concessions in Kazakstan. Amoco bought a mega-field in Azerbaijan. Unocal, the gutsiest of the American companies, drew up plans for a pair of pipelines across Afghanistan.
Everyone seemed to have conveniently ignored the endless political instability in the region - and the absence of any energy transport grid. How would Chevron, Mobil, and Amoco get their oil out of the Caspian? The safest pipeline route was through Russia to the Black Sea, and from there via tanker to the Mediterranean, but Russia and the Russian mob liked nothing better than blackmailing American oil companies. They charged, on average, three dollars for every ton of oil they put into the system. There was an alternative route to Turkey, but that would have to pass through either Georgia or Armenia, both embroiled in civil wars; Afghanistan, too, was in the middle of a vicious civil war. It would be a long time before anyone laid five feet of pipe there.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, watched in disbelief. It was pure folly to think of Central Asian oil as an alternative to Middle Eastern oil, the Saudis said. Forget the political instability. Just look at the costs. The capital expenses for lifting Caspian Sea
oil was roughly six dollars a barrel, while lifting a Saudi barrel cost only one to two. In the oil business, that was not an insignificant split, especially in the early and mid-1990s, when oil was dragging the bottom close to ten dollars a barrel. Throw in the price of building two main oil-export pipelines - adding up to something like $7 billion - and the Caspian Sea made no sense at all, particularly to the Saudis.
The Saudis knew why the oil companies were buying in: It boosted their paper reserves. They could “overbook” all those exotic Caspian Sea reserves, and the average shareholder wouldn’t be any the wiser; he wouldn’t understand how difficult it would be to get them out. But what Saudi Arabia couldn’t figure out was what the United States government was up to. The cold war was over, so who cared whether Central Asia was independent from Russia? Saudi Arabia knew Washington, whether it made economic sense or not, might put its financial weight behind Caspian oil. If the U.S. invested enough money, it might make the fantasy come to life. Even worse in some ways, the Saudis felt jilted. They had spent tens of billions of dollars to finance the Gulf War. The cost was ruinous in a down market for oil, but the U.S. had insisted that the war was necessary to maintain the status quo - to keep Saddam from invading Saudi Arabia and to assure that the House of Sa’ud would remain the world’s banker of oil.
Angry at Washington and wary of its motives, the Saudis kept their own finger on the pulse of the Caspian. Delta Oil, associated with Crown Prince ‘Abdallah and other powerful Saudis, invested in a concession in Azerbaijan. (Anger at Washington, it should be noted, didn’t prevent Delta Oil from enlisting two American partners in the cause. Business is business.) After I left the CIA, I learned that Saudi intelligence under Turki Al Faysal partnered with the Argentine company Bridas to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, passing though Afghanistan. It was the perfect match for Bridas, because Turki had better relations with the Taliban than any Saudi. He’d dumped hundreds of millions of riyals into them.
