The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “Can you tell me who they are, the people you’re with? Or what they want?”

  Wells looked at the phone. Open line. He ought to keep operational security. “Wish I could, but not now. I’m not sure you’d believe it anyway. I’m not sure I do. How are you? How’s Tonka?”

  “You put me first. That’s sweet. We’re both fine.”

  “Anything happening?”

  “I did arrest a couple of drunks on Main Street last night, but I know that doesn’t count for much.”

  Wells supposed he had that coming. “Anne. I promise. We’ll come here one day. You’d like it.”

  “That would be nice.” Though she didn’t sound convinced. “Be careful in the pool, okay? Those things can be deadly.”

  “Noted.”

  THE CLOTHES ARRIVED AN hour later, linen pants and a blue silk shirt and pure white swim trunks. They didn’t have labels. But they looked expensive. They felt expensive. They even smelled expensive. Wells tried them on and hardly recognized himself. The man in the mirror looked as sleek and shiny as a peacock looking for a mate.

  The trunks were even worse. They fit tighter than boxers. When Wells cinched them, he had the odd sensation that he was molesting himself.

  The phone trilled. “Are your clothes pleasing, monsieur?”

  “Pleasing? They’re—” Wells wanted to say absurd, but went with “very nice.”

  “Can I help you with anything else?”

  “Actually, yes. A laptop.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. We have an executive center in the hotel, but we don’t keep laptops for guests—”

  “Then buy one.” Can’t cost more than the bathing suit, Wells thought.

  “Yes, sir. Shall I put that purchase on the room also?”

  “You shall.”

  The Saudi soldiers Wells had met in Afghanistan were undisciplined and lazy, quick to boast but slow to the front lines. Wells had rarely talked to them, and he realized now how little he knew about Saudi Arabia. Before his next meeting with Abdullah, he wanted to learn. If he were still in the agency, he could have gone to the analysts at the Near East Desk or even called to the frontline operatives in Riyadh. Instead he would be reduced to Googling. Like the civilian that he was.

  The laptop arrived just as he finished his swim. It didn’t come with a receipt, and he didn’t ask what it had cost. Heads of state and billionaires must live this way. They never paid for anything. Their accountants settled up later.

  Wells booted up, got online. He expected to read for only a couple hours, but the more he learned, the more fascinated he became.

  * * *

  ABDULLAH’S LINEAGE DATED BACK to 1744, when a fundamentalist cleric named Abdul Wahhab allied with a minor Arabian ruler named Muhammad ibn Saud. At the time, Islam had become an almost polytheistic religion. Many Muslims prayed to spirits, a practice that the prophet Muhammad had banned a thousand years before.

  Wahhab demanded that Muslims follow the Quran literally and that lawbreakers face harsh penalties. Around 1743, he ordered an adulterous woman stoned to death. Because of his strict views, Wahhab was forced from his hometown of Uyayna. Looking for protection, he asked Saud if he could live in Diriyah, the village that Saud ruled.

  Saud agreed to shelter Wahhab to write and preach. Over time, Wahhab’s sermons attracted a growing audience, who called themselves Wahhabis. They pledged allegiance to Saud, forming a potent army. They fought under Saud’s flag: a green cloth with the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, in its center. Beneath the shahada, a curved white sword. The flag symbolized Saud’s vision, combining the glory of Islam with the might of the state. Wisely, Saud never demanded religious leadership for himself, leaving that role to Wahhab.

  With the Wahhabis as his soldiers, Saud conquered the central Arabian peninsula. After he died, his sons followed. By 1810, the Sauds controlled most of Arabia. Then the Turkish army used modern weapons to roll them back. In 1818, the Turks captured Riyadh and brought Abdallah, Saud’s great-grandson, to Istanbul, where he was executed. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the House of Saud remained in oblivion.

  Then it roared back.

  In 1902, Abdul-Aziz, Saud’s great-great-great-great-grandson, took Riyadh in a surprise attack. At the time, Abdul-Aziz had only a few dozen soldiers. But over the next two decades, he followed the same playbook as his eighteenth-century ancestors, harnessing religious zeal to conquer Arabia. The Ikhwan—Arabic for “brothers”—formed the core of his army. The Ikhwan were Bedouin so religious that they disliked even looking at non-Muslims, and they massacred their enemies without remorse. Abdul-Aziz could barely control them, but their brutal reputation helped him. Opposing cities surrendered to him without fighting on the condition that he keep the Ikhwan away.

  In 1924, Abdul-Aziz’s forces took Mecca. The following year, he reached Jeddah and the Red Sea, completing his conquest of the Arabian peninsula. For the second time in two centuries, the House of Saud ruled Arabia. But the Ikhwan were not ready to quit fighting. Their leaders turned against Abdul-Aziz, saying that he had allied with the British and was insufficiently religious. But Abdul-Aziz no longer needed the Ikhwan. He built a new army from more loyal tribes. Using machine guns and cars from the British, he put down the rebellion. And in September 1932, he officially created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Its flag was the same green banner that Sauds had fought under since the eighteenth century.

  ABDUL-AZIZ DIED IN 1953. His sons had ruled ever since, inheriting the world’s biggest fortune. As oil prices soared in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia became one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The princes’ wasteful ways became legendary in Europe, but plenty of money stayed inside the Kingdom. A Saudi saying held, “If you didn’t become rich during the days of King Khalid”—who ruled from 1975 to 1982—“you will never be rich.” By 1979, the average income in Saudi Arabia was higher than in the United States.

  The windfall didn’t last. In 1982, a glut of oil caused the price of crude to plunge. For most of the next two decades, it stayed below twenty dollars. The Saudi economy cratered. The princes still lived richly, but by 2000 the average Saudi made just one-fifth as much as the average American.

  Then another oil boom began, as demand for oil soared in China and India. Prices rose and rose, topping a hundred forty dollars a barrel in 2008. Even after the recession of 2009, a barrel of crude traded around eighty dollars. At that price, Saudi Arabia earned almost a billion dollars a day selling oil. Every two months, the House of Saud raked in as much cash as Bill Gates had earned in his entire life. Of course, most of that money went to keep the government running. All Saudis received free education and health care. Gasoline was heavily subsidized. And the Kingdom had no income taxes.

  Even so, at least fifty billion dollars remained every year for the family to divide. Every prince received a stipend. Third- and fourthgeneration princelings got $20,000 to $100,000 a month. Senior princes received millions of dollars a year. At the top, Abdullah and the other sons of Abdul-Aziz had essentially unlimited budgets. Abdullah’s Red Sea palace complex in Jeddah had cost more than a billion dollars.

  While the princes prospered, the new boom didn’t help average Saudis as much as the original one had. The Kingdom’s population had quadrupled since 1980 to twenty-five million. The economy had not created enough jobs to keep pace. Even though almost no women worked, millions of Saudi men were unemployed. Making matters worse, Saudi men considered blue-collar work to be beneath them. Despite the chronic unemployment, five million Indians, Egyptians, and other immigrants worked in the Kingdom as drivers, janitors, and laborers, jobs that Saudis wouldn’t take.

  The frustration among ordinary Saudis flowed into the only channel that the government allowed — militant Islam. The centuries-old pact between Wahhabi clerics and the House of Saud remained essential to the family’s claim to rule. Saudi kings called themselves Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques because control of Mecca and Medina provided their ultimate legi
timacy. Without Islam, Saudi Arabia was just another dictatorship.

  To keep religious leaders satisfied, the Sauds spent tens of billions of dollars supporting Islam. The princes rebuilt the giant mosques at Mecca and Medina, subsidized the hajj, and paid for religious schools around the world. But the clerics wanted more than money. They wanted women in burqas, and strict penalties for anyone caught drinking alcohol or having illicit sex. Like Abdul Wahhab, their spiritual father, they wanted to govern Saudi Arabia as though they were still in the seventh century. They were the most fundamental of fundamentalists.

  During the 1970s, the Saudi government had moved away from this vision of Islam. Cigarettes were sold openly. Even alcohol was quietly tolerated. State-run television broadcasts featured female newscasters. Girls’ schools were created. Then, in 1979, a Bedouin named Juhayman — Arabic for “the scowler”—led hundreds of rebels in a takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Ironically, the rebels had defied an important Quranic decree that forbade fighting in Mecca. Juhayman believed that he could ignore the decree because he had found the Mahdi, the true successor to Muhammad. Juhayman promised the Mahdi would establish a new Muslim empire and defeat armies of Christians and Jews.

  The takeover staggered the Saudi government. Police and National Guard units tried to retake the mosque, but the rebels repelled them. A siege began. The government imposed a news blackout, but it could not prevent reports of the attack from spreading worldwide.

  Besides tactical incompetence, the government had a serious problem: the prohibition on fighting near the mosque. Before the army could attack in force, the Sauds needed approval from a council of Wahhabi clerics. To win them all, the princes pledged that they would roll back the liberalizations of the 1970s. Finally, four days after the siege began, the clerics issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, ordering the rebels to surrender. With that approval, the Saudi army attacked with thousands of men. The mosque caught fire during the ensuing battle — the equivalent of open war inside St. Peter’s or at the Wailing Wall. Only the Kaaba, the sacred stone at the center of the shrine, remained undamaged.

  The rebels retreated into rooms and corridors beneath the mosque. For a week, soldiers struggled to clear them. On December 3, advised by French special forces soldiers, they dumped potent tear gas into the basement. After a final day of fighting, they captured the last rebels. Two weeks after it began, the siege ended. Witnesses estimated that more than one thousand soldiers, rebels, and civilians died, though an accurate death toll was never released.

  Outside of Saudi Arabia, the siege was quickly forgotten. But inside, its effects were profound. The implicit support it had received from senior clerics pushed the House of Saud sharply right. As it had promised, the government restricted women’s education, gave new powers to the religious police, and promoted jihad in Afghanistan.

  A GENERATION AFTER THE siege of the Grand Mosque, Saudi Arabia ran like a medium-security prison. Sex outside marriage was forbidden and dangerous. Questioning the monarchy’s right to rule was a crime. Culture and the arts hardly existed. Women couldn’t drive, or even have identity cards, unless their husbands agreed.

  Since becoming king in 2005, Abdullah had taken small steps to rein in the religious police. But the changes were mostly cosmetic. Political parties were still outlawed, women still couldn’t drive, and state-funded clerics still preached war against Israel and the West. Saudi Arabia was among the most repressed places on earth. Its main public spaces were malls, mosques — and the squares where drug dealers and murderers were beheaded.

  These rules didn’t bother the princes, of course. The Kingdom’s laws applied only loosely to them. As for average Saudis, since they couldn’t legally protest, no one knew if they were happy with the strictures they faced. The satellite dishes that speckled nearly every house suggested otherwise. So did the angry discussions in Internet chat rooms.

  On the other hand, nearly half of Saudis married their cousins, closing ranks against outsiders in the most basic way. Many believed devoutly that the Quran was the word of Allah and that non-Muslims would spend eternity in hell. Even now, the loudest protests in the Kingdom came not from reformers but from fundamentalists.

  WHEN HE FINISHED READING, Wells could see the Kingdom much more clearly.

  But the king remained a mystery. Was he a genuine reformer? Wells couldn’t tell. Still, he was glad he had stayed the night to find out exactly what Abdullah and Miteb wanted. By the time he turned off the laptop, the hotel grounds were nearly silent. Miles out to sea, yachts glimmered. A breeze filled his living room with the scent of cypress and pine. Overhead, the stars glowed. Even without the virgins — and Wells suspected that virgins were tough to come by in the south of France — this place was close to Paradise. Here, eternal life seemed not just possible but actually desirable. Wells lay on his five-thousand-dollar-a-night-bed and closed his eyes and wondered at the world that had somehow come to him.

  The Maybach picked him up the next morning. This time Miteb sat in back as classical music played. The king wasn’t in the car. Wells couldn’t help feeling disappointed. He’d wanted to see Abdullah again.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wells.”

  “Good morning, Prince.”

  “My brother sends his apologies. He’s not well this morning.”

  “Nothing too serious, inshallah.”

  “At our age, everything is serious.” Miteb pushed a button, and the music stopped. “Do you think your friends are tailing you?”

  “The agency? I doubt it. Out of sight, out of mind. Anyway, they know enough to leave me alone.”

  “You’re used to having your own way.”

  “Coming from a prince, I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult.”

  “Let’s say it’s both. And what about you? Will you report this meeting to the CIA?”

  Wells didn’t answer. In truth, he hadn’t decided.

  “You’re still loyal to your country.”

  Guilty, Wells thought. For better or worse. “If this is a back-channel plea for help from the United States, you’d be better off asking directly,” he said.

  “It’s not. We can’t have America involved.”

  “Prince, I still don’t know why I’m here. I assume it’s related to the attacks last week, but you haven’t even said that.”

  “My brother and I have a mission for you.”

  “An entire army reports to you, and you need me.”

  “We can’t depend on the army for this. It’s not in our land.”

  “Your mukhabarat, then.”

  “But as we told you yesterday, that’s precisely the problem. The muk belong to Saeed and Mansour. Do you think this pleases us? To ask an American we don’t know for help?”

  “Start at the beginning. Why me?”

  “I’ve known Pierre Kowalski many years. He’s supplied the National Guard with weapons. He gave me your name. But he said we’d have to talk in person to convince you.”

  “How can you and Abdullah come here without anyone knowing?”

  “There’s a physician in Nice who treats Abdullah. Saeed thinks he’s here for medical treatment.”

  Wells wasn’t so sure. “But don’t Mansour’s men manage your security?”

  “The king chooses his traveling companions. And if he wants to leave his security behind and go for a drive in his Mercedes, he can. Anyway, I think Saeed and his son prefer us outside the country. This way, they can talk to the other princes, campaign against us.”

  “Is that what’s happening?”

  “Not openly. But yes. It’s complicated and simple at the same time.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You heard Abdullah yesterday. He wants Khalid on the throne. His eldest son. It’s stuck in his head. He can’t let it go. And it’s creating a big instability.”

  “It’s not how the system is supposed to work.”

  “Correct. The first generation should have preference. That means Saeed. And if not Saee
d, then the princes should come together to make the decision.”

  “So how can Abdullah win?”

  “Because this problem will come very soon, anyway. Saeed is almost eighty. Even if he takes over from Abdullah, he has only a few years to rule. And once he and Nayef are gone, the first generation will be gone and the country will be just where it is now. The next generation is too large. How can we choose? Two hundred grandsons of Abdul-Aziz can claim the throne.”

  “Still. Why not let Saeed take the throne, put off the problem?”

  “Because if Saeed is king, he’ll undo all the good that Abdullah has done.”

  “You expect me to believe that Abdullah is some great force for democracy.”

  For the first time, Miteb seemed irritated. “I want you to understand our society. You know what happened in 1979?”

  Wells was glad he had read up. “The Grand Mosque.”

  “Yes. Our clerics, they’re very powerful. And most of them, they only read the Quran and the hadith, nothing else. They know everything about Islam, nothing about the rest of the world. Sheikh bin Baz was our most senior cleric until he died in 1999. His most famous fatwa, in 1966, he said that the Quran proves that the earth doesn’t go around the sun. The earth is the center and the sun moves around it, he said.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Yes. He only changed his mind in 1985, and do you know why? Prince Sultan was on the space shuttle and came to him and said, ‘Sheikh, I saw it. The earth rotates and the sun is still.’ And that convinced him. This is our society, you see. And Abdullah must move slowly. But Abdullah’s a good king. He’s a good man, and kind, and he wants more openness. The people trust him. He’s moving us in the right direction. Not like Saeed.”

  “Tell me about Saeed.”

  “So in 2002, in Mecca, a school for girls caught fire. These schools, they’re mainly old apartment buildings, not really schools, because we have so many children and not enough schools. This one, someone was cooking in the kitchen and an electric plate caught fire. It was a small fire, but it spread. There were eight hundred girls inside, more. Not just Saudi, but from Pakistan, Nigeria, everywhere. And there was only one staircase to get out. The girls started to panic. Then the religious police came. You don’t remember this?”