by Robert Baer
Black gold, ethnic conflict, Islamic fundamentalism, civil war, Russian irredentism - the Great Game was back on for sure. But who was playing and who wasn’t? And what were the rules this time around? That’s what I intended to find out.
THE FORTY-MINUTE FLIGHT from Bishkek to Osh gave me a chance to collect my thoughts about what I expected to learn in the Fergana and how. Islamic fundamentalism was waging a war without fronts or faces. Back at headquarters, I had tried to find a picture of the IMU leader, Yuldashev. There wasn’t one. How would I know if I was staring him in the face? Worrying about things like that kept me from looking out the airplane window as the Yak-40’s right wing passed within spitting range of a 4,875-meter snow-covered peak.
I had a lot of time on my hands. The month before, in October 1992, I had been evacuated from neighboring Tajikistan in the midst of a civil war between ex-Soviet apparatchiks and Islamic fundamentalists. CIA headquarters ordered me back to Washington, where I was supposed to wait until I could go back and reopen the place. Since there was nothing worse than being assigned to headquarters with little to do, I used all the skills of persuasion I’d learned in the agency to convince the head of the Central Eurasian Division, John McGaffin, to let me take a grand tour of Central Asia. He didn’t see the problem. He even approved my spending time on my Farsi in Samarkand, the ancient capital of Uzbekistan, home to a succession of conquerers from Alexander the Great to Tamerlane.
A couple of days after he’d signed my travel orders, McGaffin cornered me in the hall. “They speak Farsi in Samarkand?” he asked. I wasn’t sure, but I’d read somewhere they did in the fourteenth century. If then, why not now? Things don’t change overnight north of the Amu Darya. McGaffin let it pass.
WALKING DOWN THE GANGPLANK and stepping onto the tarmac at Osh, I wondered if my grand-tour idea had been all that smart. It was difficult to decide what was thicker: the putrid cloud of haze, dust, and smog that blocked any view of the Tian Shan, or the utter depression that wafted off the industrial wasteland and the shriveled vegetation that stretched as far as I could see. I now understood how Osh - which means “soup” in Persian - got its name. Any romantic notions I had about the Silk Route instantly evaporated.
Fortunately, my guide was waiting at the airport. A six-foot-six giant, he was standing next to an ancient Zhiguli. On the other side of the Zhiguli was a tiny old man bent at the waist like a broke-open shotgun. It took me a minute to figure out that the old man was the driver. How would he see over the steering wheel?
Ibramov, as I will call the guide, turned out to be a great traveling companion. Although he knew only about six words of English - enough to teach English literature at the local technical college - we got along fine using my Tajik, Russian, and German. More important, he was willing to take me anywhere in the Fergana.
The next morning we set out on an hour’s drive to Namangan, supposedly the crucible of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. We motored from mosque to mosque, but no one suspicious was hanging around. Incendiary posters weren’t pasted on the walls. There wasn’t any graffiti. Even though it wasn’t Friday, the Muslim holy day, there should have been some outward sign of fundamentalism. Instead, the place looked like Osh - listless. I decided to poke around one of the mosques. Before I could get out of the car, though, Ibramov grabbed my arm and pointed at a Lada parked by the sidewalk in front of the mosque. Three men were sitting in the car, looking straight ahead. They weren’t talking. The engine was off.
“Let’s go,” Ibramov said. I didn’t object. I’d obtained permission to travel around Kyrgyzstan’s part of the Fergana, but we were in Uzbekistan now. The Kyrgyz had no jurisdiction here. “I suggest we go to Kokand,” Ibramov said. “There are not so many problems there.”
As we drove away, I could see one of the men in the Lada copying down our plate numbers.
Two hours later, Ibramov accompanied me into the only hotel in Kokand with reliably running water. The place was empty except for an Uzbek man dressed in a grease-stained wool suit who occupied one of the two chairs in the lobby. Without standing, he asked what we wanted. When Ibramov pointed at me and said I needed a room, the Uzbek got up and walked over to me. “Passport, please.” I noticed his two incisors were gold.
“You don’t have permission to visit Kokand,” he said, fanning the pages of my passport without bothering to look at them. Obviously, someone had informed him that I was on my way and lacked the proper papers. Technically, I’d broken the law. Although Uzbekistan won its independence in 1991, it never discarded the old Soviet system of requiring passes to visit cities and regions it deemed sensitive. Uzbekistan didn’t trust foreigners any more than the Soviet Union had.
The man walked around the reception desk and made a call. Not more than two minutes later, two uniformed militiamen showed up with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. The Uzbek got into an animated conversation with Ibramov. It was all in Uzbek, and I didn’t understand a word. The upshot was that Ibramov smiled wanly, shook my hand, and left. I never saw him again.
When I went up to my room, the two militiamen followed me and posted themselves outside my door. This is silly, I thought. After all, I was traveling on a diplomatic passport. I wasn’t indigent, and I certainly didn’t look like a basmachi. I headed back downstairs to find out what the story was. One of the militiamen followed me.
My Uzbek minder was still there. I asked if I was under arrest.
“No, we are here to protect you. It is very dangerous in the Fergana. The basmachi, you know.”
“May I take a walk around Kokand this evening?” I asked.
“No. There are too many basmachi at night.”
Dinner - a bowl of leek soup, a piece of stale bread, and one pockmarked apple - was brought to my room. Somewhere out in the night, presumably, basmachi were swarming thick as deer flies. Whether they were plain old brigands or the heirs of the proud Muslim revolutionaries who’d taken on the Bolsheviks, I had no idea.
THE NEXT MORNING my Uzbek minder knocked on my door. “We can visit Kokand this morning,” he said.
A Russian-looking man stood behind him, dressed in a suit nearly identical to the Uzbek’s. He didn’t introduce himself, and I couldn’t figure out who he was.
I passed on the Uzbek’s offer to tour Kokand’s main textile factory and instead asked to visit the main mosque. Ibramov had told me it ran a popular madrasah. The Uzbek and the Russian looked at each other and shrugged.
The mosque was built along traditional Central Asian lines, with a tiled cupola. I wandered through it for a while, peering into the empty classrooms, before I found a man of about sixty-five, dressed in flannel robes and the ornate half-round cap that Central Asian clerics wear. He was sitting on the floor, listening to a boy recite a sura from the Qur’an. The boy’s Arabic was nearly perfect, but I doubted he understood a word. My two escorts stood in the door, while I sat on the floor and talked to the cleric, or tried to.
The cleric looked at me uncomprehendingly when I greeted him in Tajik. Either he didn’t speak Tajik or didn’t want to speak it in front of my minders. “I don’t understand,” he said in Russian.
When I tried Arabic, the cleric’s face brightened. In stilted but grammatically flawless Arabic, he asked if I was an Arab. I decided to sidestep that one. If I told him the truth, he would clam up. Even in remote Kokand, they’ve heard of Langley, Virginia. Besides, I figured my cleric friend would be more willing to confide in me if he thought I was a believer. I told him a parallel truth: that I was from California. He smiled; maybe he thought I was in the movies.
I noticed that my minders were nervous. They were whispering to each other, no doubt because the cleric and I were speaking in a language they couldn’t understand. Pick up the pace, I told myself.
“Who’s paying for these?” I asked, pointing to a stack of new Qur’ans sitting on a table in the corner.
By way of an answer, the cleric got up and brought me one. He opened it and pointed to the
stamp on the inside cover, which said it had been donated by the International Islamic Relief Organization, the richest and most active Islamic charity in the world, the same one that was raided after September 11. Now we were getting somewhere. Founded in 1978, the IIRO is a private, independent charity, at least on paper. In fact, it is a Saudi government institution, fully under the control of the royal family. King Fahd’s full brother Salman personally approved all important appointments and spending. But it’s more than a matter of control: The creation of the IIRO was an important milestone in Saudi Arabia’s veer to militant Islam.
Like other charities sponsored by the House of Sa’ud - indeed, like so much of the history of the modern Middle East - the IIRO roots lie deep in the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Although Saudi Arabia hadn’t fought in the war, the royal family was soon caught up in the backwash of recriminations. Why hadn’t its oil revenues gone to building an army that might have turned the tide of victory against the Israelis? Why had the Al Sa’ud princes been gambling in Monte Carlo when they should have been on the front with other believers? Saudi Arabia was the keeper of the holy shrines of Islam, yet it had sat on the sidelines as Islam was crushed. Sensing this post-1967 resurgence of faith and eager to cover their rear ends, the royal family started flooding charities with money, the IIRO among them.
When Saudi Arabia decided to fund the Afghan moujahidin in the early 1980s, the IIRO proved a perfect fit, a money conduit and plausible denial rolled into one. If the IIRO was caught breaking some country’s law, or one of its employees strayed and joined a terrorist group, Saudi Arabia could simply disclaim responsibility, a sleight of hand that has spared the royal family a lot of embarrassment over the years.
The IIRO was a backer of Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, the Afghan Muslim Brother it favored in 1980 when it and the United States decided to fund a holy war in Afghanistan. Sayyaf, in turn, had taken under his wing bin Laden and the other young Saudi and Muslim firebrands who came to help drive out the heathen Russians.
Knowing the IIRO was proselytizing in Central Asia was a small but important piece of the puzzle, but what message was it pushing? Was it backing a Central Asian Sayyaf? A new jihad? Or was it only handing out Qur’ans, simply trying to recall Central Asian Muslims back to the faith? My two minders decided it was time to go and motioned me to follow them. I had time to ask my cleric one last question. It had to be a good one.
“Did Saudi Arabia ever send you any of Ibn Taymiyah’s works?”
If the Saudis were handing out his works, that meant they were doing more than proselytizing.
“Who?” the cleric asked.
Damn, I thought. I’d fired my best shot and missed. Before I could ask another question, my minders came to drag me away.
On the way to the airport, seated in the backseat of the Uzbek’s Lada, I got around to talking with my Uzbek escort and his Russian friend. They were from “the security services,” they told me. The Uzbek worked for Uzbekistan’s KNB, the successor organization to the old KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. The Russian was “from Moscow,” which I took to mean he was some sort of Russian intelligence adviser to the Uzbek KNB.
In a weird way, that was the last piece of the puzzle. If I was reading the signs correctly, this time the big battle would be between Russia’s ex-Central Asian regimes and Wahhabi Islam. The Qur’ans donated by the IIRO were only a start, a foothold for a full-fledged jihad. The cleric may not have known about Ibn Taymiyah, but as my plane lifted off from Kokand, I was convinced that one day he would. Where the IIRO was, and Ibn Taymiyah was coming, the Saudis were sure to be lurking behind the curtain.
How about the United States? Was it prepared for what was coming? Well, I was one of a handful of CIA officers to ever visit the Fergana. That ought to tell you something.
WHEN I CHECKED INTO Tashkent the next morning, I told the chief about my visit to the mosque and asked him what he thought the Saudis were up to in the Fergana. He’d been in the country only six months, but he had good Russian and had gotten around a lot.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said. “Saudi Arabia is not a target. And I haven’t been to the Fergana.”
He had the same problem I’d had in Beirut when I was cultivating my Muslim Brother Zuhayr Shawish. Without a directive from Langley to look into Saudi fundamentalism in Central Asia, a CIA chief wasn’t even supposed to think about it.
“I could ask the Uzbeks,” he continued, “but I already know they wouldn’t tell me a damn thing. They’d say it was an internal matter, and that would be that.”
As for the Uzbeks, I got the distinct impression that they treated militant Islamic fundamentalists the same way the Soviet commissars had treated the basmachi revolt: dismissing them as bands of criminals.
I spent a week in Tashkent living in the embassy community. Right away I noticed that survival was on everyone’s mind. The housing was lousy. The plumbing never worked. There was always a shortage of gasoline. If there was any time left at the end of the day, the embassy staff was always saddled with some Washington project, like setting up the Peace Corps or teaching the Uzbeks how to operate voting machines, never mind that there hadn’t ever been a democratic election in Uzbekistan. In the meantime, no one had any idea what the IIRO and Saudi Arabia were up to in Central Asia.
I NEVER MADE IT to Samarkand to study Farsi. The CIA reopened the Dushanbe office in January 1993, and I was back in business. It wasn’t long before the subject of Saudi Arabia raised its head like a maniacal jack-in-the-box.
About three a.m. I heard someone pounding on my door. I couldn’t imagine who it was. To get to my office/bedroom, which was permanently lodged in the Oktoberskaya Hotel along with the Russian and Iranian embassies, you had to pass two heavily armed Tajik guards in the lobby. And once you got to the third floor, you were met by a platoon of Russian spetznatz, or special forces.
I opened the door to find myself nose-to-nose with the dough-faced local Russian chief intelligence chief. Boris Sergeivich, as I will call him, was stumbling drunk.
“Yop tavaya mat!” he yelled, spittle flying. In Russian, it means “Go fuck your mother.”
When I got Boris quieted down, he explained to me why he was so pissy. Earlier that evening, a Tajik Islamic rebel group had crossed the Panj River from Afghanistan and managed to overrun a Russian border post and cut off all the guards’ heads.
“It was your tit-sucking Saudi Arabia.” Boris’s anger had returned. “The goddamn war is over. Tell them to leave us alone.”
I couldn’t figure out what Saudi Arabia had to do with the attack. It didn’t have any troops in Afghanistan, at least officially, and the part of Afghanistan the rebels had crossed from was controlled by a group we assumed took orders from Tehran.
Boris said I was wrong. The rebels were under the command of Rasool Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami, bin Laden’s Afghani protector.
I didn’t believe that. The Russians seemed to blame everything on Saudi Arabia, from the war in Afghanistan to ethnic fighting between Armenians and Azeris in Azerbaijan. They also accused the Saudis of stoking the Chechen separatists who declared their independence in 1991. Saudi Arabia may have paid for the Afghan war, but that didn’t mean it was doing the same thing in Central Asia. Saudi Arabia was our ally; it would have told us if it was conducting a covert campaign in Tajikistan. Naive me.
I played along with Boris. I told him I’d help him find out what Sayyaf was doing, or whether Riyadh had anything to do with the attack. He said something under his breath about trusting the CIA when hell froze over. I pushed him out the door with a bottle of Black Label scotch in each hand.
Two days later, Boris knocked on my door again. He handed me a neatly typed list of names. “You will know who these bastards are,” he said. “They’re Arabs, and they’re all with Sayyaf. They were behind the attack on our border post.”
I didn’t bother sending the names to headquarters because I wasn’t supposed to be coordinati
ng with the Russians. Instead, I sent the names to Islamabad, where Beirut Bill [text omitted] was now chief. Bill, I thought, would understand what I was trying to do. And if any place would know about the fundamentalists, it was Islamabad. After all, that was where the Afghan war was run from. Another two days later, Bill sent his reply: He couldn’t find anything about Boris’s Arabs because we didn’t have any agents in Sayyaf’s camp.
It was hard to believe. Sayyaf was our creation. We’d helped him set up in Peshawar. He was one of the Peshawar Seven, the original Afghan resistance groups backed by the National Security Council’s Special Coordination Committee. Good enough, but you learn in Espionage 101 never to get involved in covert action unless you know for certain what your surrogates are doing. To know that, you need a source in the group. Obviously we didn’t have a source in Sayyaf’s group, or one who lasted through the Afghan conflict. From a spy’s perspective, it was a fatal mistake.
Boris, for one, would have found this incomprehensible. The Soviets never ran a covert campaign unless they controlled it from A to Z. If they asked the East Germans to run a campaign in Africa or South America, they made damn sure they knew what was going on. They never would have trusted the Pakistanis or Saudis to tell the truth.
I avoided Boris for the next few weeks. When I couldn’t help passing him in the dim corridor we shared, he smirked as if to say: See, I told you so. I’m sure he was convinced we knew what Sayyaf, his master, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the fundamentalists in Afghanistan were up to. I would have been embarrassed for myself and my country had he learned otherwise.
