C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  Beginning in 2004, the first year Marikkar led his Sri Lankan prayer group to Washington to meet with the mother ship, the money flowed: more than $50 million in military aid over the next three years. (By comparison, from 2000 to 2003, Sri Lanka received a fifth of that amount in military aid.) Also that year, Sri Lanka began receiving money from the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program—$2.5 million, explicitly to buy American-made weapons and pay for the Sri Lankan armed services to receive American-led military trainings. The money was modest, by American standards, but big in Sri Lanka, a poor island nation of around twenty million people. Really, though, it was the thought that counted: facing international condemnation for its massive human rights abuses, the Sri Lankan government took the infusion as a green light to win its war against the Tamil Tigers by any means necessary.

  In February 2008, Zarook Marikkar led another government delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast for meetings with Aderholt, Alabama’s Republican senator Jeff Sessions (a member of the Armed Services Committee), and GOP leader Rep. Mike Pence, a member of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on South Asia. Not long after the Sri Lankans returned home, the Sri Lankan government began its final campaign. Reconciliation? Not exactly. By then, the Tamil Tigers were already beaten. They wanted to negotiate. Three hundred thousand Tamil civilians crowded onto a beach that had been designated a safe zone and waited.

  And then the government started shelling. “Intentionally and repeatedly,” declares a 2010 report by the International Crisis Group. They targeted “civilians, hospitals, and humanitarian operations.” Estimates of the dead are at least in the tens of thousands. Aderholt didn’t say a word.

  On the day of the 2009 National Prayer Breakfast, a group of fifteen congressmen, including Aderholt, Wolf, and Pitts, delivered a letter to the Sri Lankan ambassador demanding a little payback for their spiritual support: they wanted the nation’s Buddhist party to kill a bill that would outlaw the use of “force, fraud, or allurement” in seeking religious conversions.

  The Family has good reason to oppose such measures. In Lebanon, a country that has long been violently divided between Christians and Muslims, it has used just such methods to introduce Muslims to its “universal inevitable”—Jesus, American-style. Which brings us back to C Street. At the heart of the effort is Sen. Tom Coburn, the C Street Republican who lied about his efforts to negotiate a financial agreement between Sen. Ensign and his mistress’s husband.

  Coburn is one of the few members of his class of ’94 radical Right coterie to voluntarily honor his commitment to term limits, serving just six years in the House. But he published his book, Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders, in 2003—a year before he returned to Washington, this time as a senator, no term limits in sight. He also returned to C Street. It was Coburn, along with Rep. Steve Largent, who had organized the C Street club that included Zach Wamp and pro-life Democrats Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle. These men were, as Coburn writes, in Breach of Trust, “a small band of trusted friends in Congress that gave me the security and confidence I needed to stand up for what I knew was right.”

  Coburn is the conscience of the Christian Right, the man who never waters down his opinions for the sake of prime time. He took a stand against federal spending based on Psalm 15—scripture he’d framed and hung to face visitors in his office—which is a stretch justifiable only if one sees the federal bonds used to raise funds as a form of “usury.” He railed against “attractive young congressional staffers” oblivious to the wages of sexual sin, and shanghaied them into watching a special slideshow he’d assembled, graphic images of genitals ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases. The “greatest threat to our freedom we face today,” he has said, are gays, who’ve “infiltrated the very centers of power.”

  In 2005, at the Family’s behest, Coburn waded into the politics of possibly the most religiously conflicted nation on earth: Lebanon, a “natural battleground,” says a Muslim member of the Lebanese parliament, Misbah Ahdab, who later met Coburn in Tripoli. Coburn listed the purpose of his first $6,500, three-day trip as building the same kind of confidential prayer groups in government he met with back in Washington. The difference is that Lebanon has been bloodied by a civil war between Christians and Muslims for most of the last century. “It’s kind of difficult here,” said Ahdab, a Sunni Muslim who has taken to calling himself a follower of Jesus when speaking with Americans. He meant the secret Christian meetings inspired by Cohen. “It could be misinterpreted or misunderstood. There are a lot of conspiracy theories around.”

  There’s also a lot of history. In 1958, Eisenhower invaded to protect the divided nation’s Christian government, and in the 1970s the U.S. intervened again, this time on behalf of a Christian militia modeled on pre-war European fascism. When that didn’t work out, the U.S. gave tacit approval to a Syrian invasion rather than face the prospect of an independent Lebanon. U.S. troops went ashore again in 1982, and left in 1983 after Islamic militants drove two truck bombs into marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen. There have been lulls in the fighting since, but Lebanon is, in short, one of the most dangerous and fragile countries in the world, a nation that is now just barely balanced between its rival Christian and Muslim communities. It’s the worst place imaginable for an American politician to attempt the church-state merger he couldn’t get away with at home.

  “Coburn could not have demonstrated his stupidity more,” says John Esposito, a professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, where he runs a center for Muslim-Christian understanding. “It could affect not just U.S.-Arab relations, but more importantly it could affect the relations within the country itself between Muslims and Christians. This situation is really mindless. Lebanon is a tinderbox. All you gotta do is scratch the surface.”

  The United States did more than that. Between Coburn’s first visit in 2005 and his next, in April 2009, the United States committed to $410 million in new military aid, with a shipment of M60 tanks arriving that spring. But Coburn was bringing something bigger: a new kind of Christ for Lebanon. Upon his return to Beirut, traveling with Rep. Mike Doyle, Tim Coe, and two other Family leaders, Lebanon’s Muslim “followers of Jesus” threw him a party. Two hundred members of Beirut’s business and political elite, including the U.S. ambassador, turned out. Samir Kreidie, a cigar-chomping entrepreneur who counts on his Family relations to bring in contracts for aid work, hosted the event at his Beirut penthouse, the top two floors of a fifteen-story building, with a wrap-around balcony.

  “[Doug Coe] introduces them to me,” Kreidie told my colleague Kiera Feldman, a journalist with whom I researched the Family’s overseas travels. “[Coe] is like a connector of all these foundations all over the world.” Much of Kreidie’s work is admirable—for example, eye surgery clinics throughout the Middle East—but it is not without its financial rewards. “For example, with time I go more to the States, and I get introduced to bankers or to franchises and I take their franchises to the Middle East. So we decided that when we do business together, we use fifteen percent of the income to serve the poor, and eighty-five percent to our pocket. Nice formula!” He called the Family, with which he has been working since 1993, “a mafia of good deeds,” and had coined a Family motto to express the group’s idea of common ground between Christians and Muslims: “Jesus for the world.” Another Family man, former congressman Mark Siljander, describes Kreidie as “carrier” for an “infectious agent,” his term for Jesus. That’s not conversion, argues Siljander, but reconciliation: the submission of Muslims to the true Son of God. Politics, Kreidie says, is only a side effect.

  “ ‘I come as a person,’ ” Kreidie remembers Coburn saying at the reception, “ ‘I didn’t come as a politician.’ ” That wasn’t quite true—while Rep. Doyle was on the Family’s private tab, Coburn charged taxpayers more than $11,000 for his mission. When traveling domestically, members of Congress must hew to a strict budget; but f
or overseas travel, there’s no limit, and the State Department is responsible for making arrangements. Coburn was on the government’s generous tab, he was addressing Lebanese leaders, and he was representing the United States. “Senator Coburn was bringing the spirit of Jesus Christ and the teachings of Jesus Christ,” remembers MP Ahdab.

  “ ‘We American people,” Coburn continued, according to Kreidie, “ ‘we love the world, and we want to build democracy. We want to build freedom. And also I came to tell you that I forgive you because not every Muslim or every Lebanese or every Arab is bad.’ ” Then came the heart of Coburn’s message: how to reconcile with Israel, three years after the 2006 July War in which Israeli forces, responding to Hezbollah rocket strikes, attacked Lebanese civilians with “reckless indifference,” according to Human Rights Watch. Regardless of one’s political perspective, it was a horrendously uneven match, with much of Southern Lebanon reduced to rubble, the ruins seeded with cluster bombs, and more than a thousand Lebanese civilians killed. Forty-three Israeli civilians were killed, as well. But such numbers evidently meant little to Coburn, who prescribed his personal Jesus as a balm for the wounds of a war between Muslims and Jews. The solution was for everybody to become Christian, or “followers of Jesus,” as the Family likes to say, imagining that to be more neutral phrasing. Not that Coburn was even-handed. His Christ went well beyond America’s already Israel-friendly foreign policy, to instruct the Muslims in their spiritual duties; the burden of reconciliation was on them. “He taught us how to love Israel,” Kreidie said, his voice warm with the memory. “Who refuses love?” Kreidie asked. “Who?”

  Not Kreidie, Coburn’s friend of many years. “When there is a senator who loves me and who prays for me, it affects me a lot,” said Kreidie. “He gives me such power. And whenever you need something you can call him.”

  Next on Coburn’s calendar was a trip with Kreidie to the north of Lebanon, to see a Family school called the Development Culture Leadership Center (DCL), in the village of Syr. Traveling with them were Rep. Doyle and Tim Coe. In Syr, they would meet another of the Family’s men in Lebanon, Mounzer Fatfat. Kreidie is short and squat, built like a troll; Fatfat is tall and straight-backed and handsome, with an earnest look in his eyes. But both men are natural backslappers, followers of Jesus who keep their eye on the money. Through Doug Coe, Fatfat told a colleague at the leadership center, he met not only Jesus but also George W. Bush. A naturalized American citizen, Fatfat joined the U.S. occupation government in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad and won control of the Ministry of Youth, formerly the lucrative fiefdom controlled by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. “I had to convince them that [he] was not coming back,” Fatfat told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of Uday’s death. “People thought it was American Hollywood, a trick.” But no: Iraq’s 167 youth centers and 350 sports clubs were Fatfat’s now. His task? Raising money, helping young potential leaders learn English and computer skills—a mission that Fatfat would soon bring home to Lebanon.

  After he left Iraq, Fatfat kept up the relationships that had got him there: with Coe, whom he or his staff in Syr provided with daily updates (the password for the center’s computer was “dougcoeleb,” for Doug Coe Lebanon), and with the State Department, from which he helped win a $200,000 grant to send five Lebanese students to Christopher Newport University, a public school in Virginia that provided matching funds. The grant was part of a set-aside arranged by Rep. Frank Wolf, and the president of Christopher Newport is former senator Paul Trible (R-VA), a longtime Family member who, according to a former Family member, Kate Phillips, turned the school’s honors program into a recruiting vehicle for the Family. “The expression Trible used to say was, ‘I have a small universe, but I’m the king of my universe.’ ” Christopher Newport’s vice president for student services, Maury O’Connell, says that the federally funded scholarships were the result of Trible and Fatfat’s “kinship” through the National Prayer Breakfast.

  Abir Mariam, a member of the class of 2012 at Christopher Newport, is one of the beneficiaries of that kinship. In 2007, Fatfat contacted the principal of Mariam’s high school. There was an opportunity for Syr’s best and brightest, and Mariam, the school’s top student, was summoned for an interview. Fatfat told her he could help her get a Fulbright to America—but there were more important criteria than grades. She sat for an interview with Fatfat and four others. “They wanted to know how I accept other beliefs.” Mariam thought they meant American culture. In a way, they did; the Lebanese Christian community is one of the oldest in the world. One didn’t have to travel to America to learn about Christ. But the Jesus Fatfat had in mind? For Mariam, that would require an audience with Doug Coe. An overnight stay at the Cedars was the first stop in America for Mariam and the Fulbright scholars.

  Coe told her about Jesus, and about America, and Abir discovered she was very good at accepting other beliefs. She is a follower of Jesus now, she says, and she always was; Muslims love Jesus. “We have to follow the message of Jesus. It’s like a message from God. So we have to believe in him.” When she graduates, she says, she will take that message back to Lebanon, by starting a branch of the Family’s program for young would-be politicians. They’ll study the “principle of Jesus,” she says, and her mentor, Fatfat, will be there to support her at every step along Christ’s path.

  “Ahmed”* was an adult student who met Fatfat with Mariam in 2007 as part of the program that would later become known as the DCL Center. But Ahmed didn’t get to go to America. He was at the center in 2009 when Coburn came with his Family delegation, expanded by the time they got to Syr to include not just Rep. Doyle and Tim Coe but also a number of American businessmen. “Madam Doria,” said Ahmed, speaking of a colleague of Fatfat’s named Doria Charmand, “asked me to bring some orphans to the center. But I thought, We don’t have orphans in Syr! Then she asked me to bring any children who are poor just to get picture with the politicians.” That wasn’t the only doctored picture. Fatfat presented Coburn and Doyle with a brochure about the center’s future. There was a picture of a Lebanese village with a cross over it. But there are no churches in Syr. Maybe they would build one, Ahmed thought: Fatfat had just bought a piece of land close by, for $1.2 million.

  “The families of Syr are thinking our children go to the DCL just to learn the English language,” says Ahmed. “But there are a lot of secrets at the DCL. It’s for changing minds and getting students to America to study in the U.S. and maybe come back to Lebanon and they have different ideas about Muslims and Jesus. To abandon our culture and our religion. It’s a shame on Mounzer Fatfat, on the American people, especially the politicians that they ‘help’ us in this way to give money to change our minds.”

  One of Ahmed’s teachers was a man named Toufic Agha. A native of Syr, he’d lived in Canada for thirty years, working as a journalist with Radio Canada International and then developing distance education English-language programs. In 2008, Fatfat invited him to return to Syr to run the center’s English-language education. Agha was impressed by Fatfat’s government connections, both in the United States and in Lebanon. And Fatfat had a powerful sponsor, he told Agha: an American named Doug Coe. When Agha was barely a month into the job, in early 2009, Fatfat told Agha that Coe wanted to meet him. Agha would be visiting Toronto soon; would he make time to go to Virginia?

  “I said, sure, I booked a ticket, I went over there, I met Doug in person,” Agha told us. “I spent three days at the mansion.” The Cedars. “The one meeting I had with Doug Coe, he asked me a question at the beginning of the meeting: ‘What do you think is the problem with the world?’ And he answered the question: Curriculum. He meant that people are receiving education all over the world but the real education is the principles of Jesus. We have to educate every citizen on Earth about that and become one community. So it’s ‘Jesus plus nothing.’ ”

  What bothered Agha most was that some citizens seemed to matter more than others. The center wasn’t really about Syr; it was
about extracting talented youth from the town and its surroundings. “The ultimate objective is that these are individuals who can be influential later on, occupy certain positions in Lebanon, and their loyalty would be to the Family.” And it wasn’t happening just in Syr; there are leadership centers like the DCL all over Lebanon, and new projects being launched in Jordan. There is an old and ironic precedent for such a practice in that part of the world: the Ottoman Empire’s Janissaries, an elite force composed of poor Christian boys plucked from their families for conversion, education, and privilege—in return for absolute loyalty to the sultan.

  When Agha brought his concerns to Fatfat, Fatfat told him to think bigger. Just look at the kind of names they were attracting, “high-caliber persons,” he told Agha. Agha sent me pictures of Coburn, Doyle, and wealthy American businessmen. The center, it seemed to him, was for them, the Americans, not the children. Then he read the Twitter feed of an American businessman named Clyde Lear, who was traveling with the congressmen. April 5: “Mounzer showed us an orphan school with 3 room full of kids and its [sic] Sunday!”—the center and its students, none of them orphans—“Then an [sic] acres of land to build upon.” Lear had fallen for the misinformation Fatfat fed him. “Orphans, mostly, being taugh [sic] by Toufic Agha and others.” Agha decided he was being used as an unwitting front man for Fatfat’s fake orphan school, “to raise huge funds” from potential donors such as Lear.