by Robert Baer
EVEN AFTER THE BLACK PRINCE was gone, I wasn’t done with the story. In New York I looked up one of his associates. Born in Sri Lanka, the man was now a naturalized American citizen. He once worked for the Qatari mission in the U.N. but now owned a ski lodge in Vermont.
He was worried about talking to me. “It’s been very bad for me and my family with the government. I don’t want any more trouble.”
After I convinced him I was a friend of the black prince, he told me his story. In 1995, when the current Amir overthrew his father, he made the tactical error of siding with the father and the black prince, which made him the enemy of the foreign minister and the Amir. One day the foreign minister showed up in New York and told him that he could either change sides and inform on the black prince, or risk being turned in to American authorities. “What for?” he asked. “I haven’t broken the law.” The foreign minister answered, “It doesn’t matter; you’ll soon see.”
Soon after, the FBI showed up at his Bronx apartment building. Agents went door-to-door asking the Sri Lankan’s neighbors whether they were aware he was a terrorist. Separately, agents went to New York University and questioned his children, who were students there. The grilling took place in a squad car parked in front of a university building so other students could get a good look. The Sri Lankan’s children were let go, but not before being humiliated. He and his wife were held at the FBI Manhattan field office for twelve hours before being released. Surveillance on the Sri Lankan and his wife continued for over a month. Even their lodge in Vermont was watched.
There was no way I could put all the pieces together. But it was obvious to me that the foreign minister had a lot of clout in Washington. The money he put into lobbying and public-relations firms from 1997 to 1999 - $24,628,799.36, to be exact - bought him a piece of the U.S. justice system. The money allowed Qatar to stiff the FBI team sent to Doha in February 1996 to arrest Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. It also harnessed the FBI to intimidate Qatar’s opposition, maybe even a source of information that could have prevented September 11. Not bad for a country that lived off of American oil companies.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1998, when I was living in France, I got a call from a young Wall Street Journal reporter named Danny Pearl. We met in Geneva. With a wiry frame and intense eyes, he was one of the most thorough, dogged, and honest reporters I’d ever come across. You knew right away he would never give up on a story. I told him about KSM and Qatar. He listened, took notes, and promised to follow up on it one day. We saw each other from time to time in Washington. He would bring up the Khalid Sheikh Muhammad story, but neither of us had anything new to add.
Two days after September 11, I received this e-mail from Pearl:
Hi, how are things? Did your book come out? I hope you weren’t near the Pentagon Tuesday.
Like half the paper, I’m being roped into reporting on bin Laden’s network… some of the suspects supposedly had UAE passports, and I remember you talking once about how Fujairah was a hot spot for fundies.
Pearl called me the next day. I reminded him about our talks on KSM and Qatar. “Worth thinking about,” he replied.
I have no way of knowing whether Pearl went to Karachi and asked about Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. The Wall Street Journal says no, that he was working on the shoe-bomber case. But I can’t help but be struck by the fact that one of the witnesses in the Pearl murder trial fingered Khalid Sheikh Muhammad as his murderer.
THE FINAL CHAPTER came to me indirectly, from a friend in London who told me that a few days after September 11, Pearl called the foreign ministry in Qatar to ask whether Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was behind the attacks. I didn’t need to be told that the Qataris adamantly denied knowing anything about September 11 or KSM. Still, I wonder whether the Qataris called KSM and told him that Pearl was on his trail. Maybe by the time this book appears in print, we’ll have that answer from his own mouth. It’s certain that no one in Washington is going to demand an answer from Qatar, our new best ally in the Gulf.
But we’re not going to find the answers to a lot of life-and-death questions until our government gets serious about terrorism and starts demanding the truth from places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And believe me, there are more questions than answers after September 11. Another Qatari told me that in the late 1990s, Ayman Zawahari, bin Laden’s Egyptian Muslim Brother deputy, and a dozen other bin Laden associates were all given refuge in Qatar - with the knowledge of the government. As for Saudi Arabia, we still don’t have an answer why Omar Bayyumi showed up in San Diego with hundreds of thousands of dollars and helped to settle two Saudi hijackers. He is out of the FBI’s reach, living quietly somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
I often wonder if the money for Colin Powell’s speech at Tufts University came from the same Saudi defense ministry account used to pay Omar Bayyumi. Unlikely but not impossible, considering the nature of Washington’s fifty-year marriage with the kingdom. But it’s not history that should worry us; it’s truth. Until we start demanding the truth from Saudi Arabia - and telling ourselves the truth, too - there will be more September 11s and more tragedies like Danny Pearl’s murder. That much you can take to the bank.
Epilogue
A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.
- Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606
WASHINGTON’S ANSWER for Saudi Arabia - apart from the mantra that nothing’s wrong - is the same as its answer for the rest of the Middle East: Democracy will cure everything. Talk the royal family into ceding at least part of its authority; aid and abet the reform-minded princes; set up a nice little model parliament; compromise the firebrands with a Cabinet position or two, a couple of political parties, and some money to grease the skids; send Jimmy Carter in to monitor the initial election; and in a few generations, Riyadh will be Ankara, or maybe even Stockholm. The governmental mechanism might not work all that well, but the people who run the government day to day are, for the most part, committed body, mind, and spirit to rooting out corruption, rounding up terrorists, and recognizing the right of the people to self-govern.
An article in the October 6, 2001, National Journal - a reliable organ of Washington Think - sums up the approach and the problem. Ned Walker, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt and the number two man in the Riyadh embassy in the 1980s, told the Journal: “You don’t get real economic development without democratization. For the long-term stability of the governments in the region, we should encourage democratization, which means we have to help them build civil societies in the context of their cultures.”
Chas W. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was bullishly reassuring: “Al Qaeda is directed first and foremost at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. You can be damn sure that any al Qaeda operative is on the Saudi wanted list and that any senior operative is high on that list.”
“Saudi Arabia has fought its own counter-terrorism battles,” added Anthony Cordesman, late of the Defense Department and now a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Saudi Arabia is in the process of massive social and economic change. It’s change that’s led a small minority to turn to violence.”
You can hear this tune all over Washington, from Foggy Bottom to the think tanks to the local op-ed pages, even out at the CIA, an organization never much for social engineering. Democracy will triumph in the desert as it triumphed in America and Europe. People are people, and we all want the same thing.
It’s utter nonsense. As far as I can tell, democracy’s proponents are talking about free and fair elections in Saudi Arabia - one person, one vote; the whole nine yards. Let’s start by taking a look at the last time there were true democratic elections held in an Arab country: Algeria in late 1991 and early 1992. When it became clear the fundamentalists were about to win an overwhelming majority and impose an Islamic constitution, the army stepped in. The country was immediately plunged into a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. It’s still going on to
day.
Why would we expect Saudi Arabia to be different? According to one poll conducted in October 2001, 95 percent of educated Saudis between the ages of twenty-five and forty-one support bin Laden. There’s no reason why we should accept the results as hard facts, but in the absence of any other information, we pretty much have to. In October 2002 I asked a leader of the Saudi opposition, Muhammad al-Masari, what he thought. There was no doubt in his mind that an Islamic government would succeed the Al Sa’ud if the Saudis were allowed to decide their own political destiny. I couldn’t resist asking al-Masari if either the British or American governments had asked him what he thought about democracy in Saudi Arabia. “No one from either government has ever asked me anything,” Masari said.
THE OCTOBER 2001 POLL didn’t answer why the Saudis support bin Laden, though I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s that bin Laden dares to do what the United States of America refuses to do: stand up to the thieves who rule his country. Or maybe, as Washington’s neoconservatives say, it’s that they just hate the West and its values. Whatever the reason, the practical effect is that a democratic election in Saudi Arabia would bring to power a militant Islamic government more hostile than Khomeini’s Iran. Good-bye, cheap, subsidized oil. Hello, $144 a barrel, just as Osama promised.
The only reason this fairy tale about the triumph of desert democracy lives on, as far as I can tell, is that it allows those who matter in Washington to sleep soundly in their Georgetown town houses and suburban mini-mansions and faux châteaus. If Riyadh is only an election removed from a European-style parliament, then it’s okay to keep grabbing for the petrodollars; okay to turn a blind eye to the billion-dollar commissions; okay to conveniently forget that the ambassador prince who showers gifts and sinecures all over Washington is as deep in the muck as the princes back home; okay to ignore the fact that even when the Al Sa’ud were offered Osama bin Laden’s head on a platter by the Sudanese, they said no, thank you; okay to build up that client list and make the calls to sell those private jets so you can pull down your seven-figure stock-option profits.
Ned Walker, who is all for democratization in Saudi Arabia, is president of the Middle East Institute, supported in part by Saudi princes who would rather crawl on their knees to Mecca than sit still for a popular vote. Chas Freeman, who is so certain that the Saudi monarchy is leaving no stone unturned in its search for al Qaeda, is president of the Middle East Policy Council, whose board members, last I looked, included Frank Carlucci and Fuad Rihani, research and development director of the Saudi bin Laden Group.
And those are just the small fry, for God’s sake, the innocents - the ones who are feeding off the crumbs left from all those consulting firms run by former CIA directors and onetime secretaries of state. At the same time the Defense Policy Board was shocking official Washington by suggesting that Saudi Arabia might be the real evil axis of global terrorism, the board’s chairman, Richard Perle, was serving as a managing partner of Trireme Partners, a venture-capital firm that invests in companies specializing in technology, goods, and services related to homeland security and defense. While Perle was excoriating the Saudis and urging war against Iraq, his partners were meeting with leading Saudi businessmen in an effort to raise $100 million in new investments, according to an article by Seymour Hersh in the March 17, 2003, New Yorker. The chief middleman in arranging the meetings, Hersh writes, was Adnan Khashoggi, the same Khashoggi who seems to have conveniently left behind that briefcase stuffed with $1 million during a visit to Richard Nixon at San Clemente. Hersh writes that Perle himself took part in one of the meetings - in France, at a Marseilles restaurant in early January 2003 - but he assured Hersh that he would never confuse his public and private roles. Perle resigned subsequently as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This pattern of behavior that Sy Hersh paints is one repeated time and again in the nation’s capital. Ask the Saudis for money, and if they don’t pony up, squeeze them for it. Foment crisis, then figure out how to capitalize on it.
This fantasy of a democracy is corrupting foolishness. We all know what version of “democracy” the State Department has in mind for Saudi Arabia. (Think Kuwait.) It’s insulting to try to make us believe it’s the real thing, just as it’s degrading for all those executive-branch officials and spokespersons who get trotted out to pay lip service to the myth. Say that the truth is something else for long enough, and you’ll forget what the truth really is.
There are something like seventeen million Saudis. (It’s the five million plus “guest workers” who bring the total population up over twenty-two million.) The average Saudi is too poor, oppressed, and afraid to express any sort of genuine political opinion. They make do with what they’re given by the Al Sa’ud: mosques, the Qur’an, subsidized food, one-way tickets to Afghanistan. But they’re not the people I’m talking about. I’m talking about the people who run the country, the people who control the oil money, the people who take the bribes and pay the protection money and fly over to Morocco whenever they want to get laid by someone other than their eleven wives. These are the people who would rather keep Saudi Arabia stuck in the ninth century and spend the oil money on themselves than build a stable country.
Washington abetted the whole thing, even encouraged the Al Sa’ud to run a kleptocracy. The result is a kingdom built on thievery, one that nurtures terrorism, destroys any possibility of a middle class based on property rights, and promotes slavery and prostitution. We can’t get around the fact that the House of Sa’ud underwrites the mosque schools that turn out the jihadists, just as it administers the charities that fund the jihadists. It channels the anger of the jihadists against the West to distract it from the rot in the House of Sa’ud. And by the way - in case I didn’t make myself perfectly clear earlier - the royals wouldn’t allow a real popular vote unless you wrapped them in Semtex and attached a burning ten-second length of detcord to help them make up their minds.
Saudi Arabia is, in a phrase, a goddamn mess, and it’s our goddamn mess. The United States made Saudi Arabia the private storage shed for our oil reserves. We reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price and grabbed every Saudi petrodollar we could lay our hands on. We taught the Saudis by example what was expected of them and neglected the fruits of our own creation. The Saudi Arabia of today flows in a direct, unbroken line from the $1 million that Adnan Khashoggi allegedly forgot to carry away from San Clemente in 1968, through Boeing’s reupping Khalid bin Mahfouz as its consultant on the Saudia airline deal, to all the hands still dipping furiously into the Saudi till even as the place gets ready to implode.
We can walk away from the moral consequences of our actions, but we can’t walk away from economic consequences. We crow about democracy and talk about someday weaning ourselves from a dependency on foreign oil, but in the entire history of America’s dependence on foreign oil, there has never been a single honest, sustained effort to reduce long-term U.S. petroleum consumption. The oilmen who now occupy the White House would rather host a Marilyn Manson concert on the South Lawn than get serious about alternative fuels. Not that I want to let the Clinton people off the hook, or the first Bush team, or the Reaganites, Carterites, Fordites, or Nixonites: Screwing up Saudi Arabia might be the most successful bipartisan undertaking of the last half century.
Not all the wishing and hoping in the world will change the basic reality of the situation, which is as follows:
• The industrial world is dependent on the oil reserves of the Islamic world and will be for decades to come, whether it’s the already developed reserves of the largely Arab states or the soon to be developed reserves of Central Asia.
• Of the Islamic oil states, none is more critical than Saudi Arabia, because (a) it sits on top of the largest proven reserves; (b) it serves as the market regulator for the entire global petroleum industry; and (c) it has the money, the political will, and the religious zeal to pursue control of the Arab Peninsula and Central Asia.
•
Of all the oil-consuming states, none consumes more than the United States, none enjoys anything like the most-favored-nation status that the U.S. enjoys with the Saudis, and thus none is more dependent on Saudi oil to fulfill its appetite and to keep doing so at a compliments-of-the-house rate.
• If Saudi Arabia tanks, and takes along the other four dysfunctional families in the region who collectively own 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, the industrial economies are going down with it, including the economy of the United States of America.
Like it or not, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are joined at the hip. Its future is our future. So what can America do?
Counterintuitive as it might seem, Syria offers one way out of the mess. Twenty years ago, Syria was Saudi Arabia: not in the vast sums of money (it’s not a major oil producer), not in the ruling kleptocracy, but as the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. When I first set foot in Damascus in 1980, I estimated that Hafiz al-Asad would have maybe three or four years before he went under. The Muslim Brothers owned the street. The mosque schools were teaching jihad, just as the Saudi madrasahs do today. The mosque public-address systems blared out a message of hate and revenge, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today. Lebanon next door was an arms bazaar: You name it, someone had it. Asad had seized power in a military coup in 1970. What goes around comes around, I figured; the guy’s going to get strung up on a light pole in downtown Damascus like a lot of other Syrians. Instead, he died in his sleep at age seventy, wasted by disease but ruler to the end.
We’ve already been over why: the ruthless assault on the Sunni stronghold at Hama, the way Asad took control of the mosque schools and silenced and killed dissent when it wouldn’t shut up, his total control of the armed forces, and so on. Pretty it wasn’t. “Democracy” it certainly isn’t. But Hafiz al-Asad forced a rule of law on the Syrian people, the same rule of law the Al Sa’ud have refused to force on the Saudis, most notably themselves. When Asad handed the country over to his son, it was as stable a dictatorship as any in the Middle East.
