Blow the House Down (18 page)

CHAPTER 26

M
AX, YOU BASTARD,
where'd you get to?” Yuri sounded genuinely pissed.

“I met a girl in Larnaca. We got to drinking, and, well, you know, when I woke up, your boat was gone.”

“You went at it for twenty-four hours? Wow.”

I knew I was running this girl thing into the ground. But the fact is that in this business you pretty much have to orient your life around a lie—or “cover for action,” as headquarters calls it. If you're in Moscow and you own a dog, you spend your two-year tour walking Moscow's streets and parks. It gives you a reason for being out late at night, getting up at the crack of dawn, wandering around strange neighborhoods picking up shit. Antique collecting, jogging, amateur archaeology—they all work the same way. I can't remember when, but by default my cover for action became women. It seemed to still be working, at least with Yuri.

“I need to get to Lebanon,” I told him, “but not through the front door.”

It wasn't just that I didn't want to fly from Tel Aviv to Amman, Jordan, and from there on to Beirut on an overstretched German passport or an even more overworked Irish one, although that was certainly part of it. I also had to consider that I'd used Rafik Hariri to bait the Saudi trap, and I didn't want anyone thinking I was now heading to the prime minister's office in Lebanon. That's the problem with misdirection: You unknowingly burn bridges you might need later.

“Okay. Okay. I'll fix it,” Yuri said. “I got a car leaving tonight. Call this number in Ramallah, and they'll tell you where to go.”

You make a Russian your friend, and he sticks with you the whole way, potholes and all.

 

The number Yuri gave me led me to a garage just outside Ramallah—more accurately, a shed with a pit decorated with portraits of suicide bombers and presided over by a lone mechanic changing the transmission on a twenty-year-old Peugeot. After the mechanic made me a glass of tea, he took me around back to a sparkling Mercedes that looked as if it had just come out of the showroom.

“A 2001,” he said, polishing the door handle with a rag.

Twenty minutes later a Palestinian in his twenties showed up, wearing Top-Siders, Quicksilver jeans, and a polo shirt. He put me in the passenger seat and we headed off east, to Jordan. Two miles from the border, we stopped by the side of the road so the driver could switch the yellow Israeli plates for green Palestinian ones.

As soon as we crossed the Israeli line, he stopped again and exchanged the Palestinian plates for Jordanian ones. Jordanian customs was a breeze—five minutes flat. The driver seemed to know everyone by first name.

We were halfway to Amman when it finally dawned on me what Yuri did for a living these days: He fenced cars. The new Audis and Porsches and Beemers waiting to board the boat in La Spezia, the new Mercedes I was riding in were all stolen.

 

By the time we passed through Amman and were heading to the Syrian border, I was dead asleep. I woke up just enough at the next checkpoint to give the driver my German passport (at least I thought it was the German one), but I might just as well have handed him a four-day pass to Disney World. Yuri's networks clearly included Syrian immigrations and customs.

By the time I emerged into the land of the living again, the car was bouncing along a rutted dirt road. Dusk was turning to dark, but it was light enough to see we were ascending up into the anti-Lebanon range. Below was Zabadani, the old Iranian camp that was used to supply the Pasdaran in the 1980s, a stark reminder that I was about to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

When we got to the top of the pass, the road was hardly a cow path. We slowed down to a crawl, driving off the path to avoid boulders. My driver obviously knew the road. At the very top, someone had plowed a path through the remaining patches of snow. There wasn't a Syrian or Lebanese border guard in sight.

The road improved as we dropped down the other side into the Biqa' Valley. In Hamm, the first village, the road was even paved. Thirty minutes later, in Balabakk, the driver dropped me off in front of the legendary Palmyra Hotel. He might have said ten words the entire way. Nearby, the Roman ruins glowed in the light of a nearly full moon.

Before I went up to my room, I ordered a taxi for the next morning to take me to Beirut. I wasn't going to Beirut, but there was no sense in telegraphing that I was really going to Shtawrah.

CHAPTER 27

Shtawrah, Lebanon

S
ITTING ASTRIDE THE
B
EIRUT
-D
AMASCUS HIGHWAY,
Shtawrah is the dividing line between East Biqa' and West Biqa', ground zero of one of the most continuously dangerous places in the world. I'd come by service taxi, an hour door-to-door from the Palmyra. Not a long trip, but one I didn't want to make often.

Shtawrah's Ritz Hotel is the epicenter of the Biqa' Valley's drug trafficking. Walk into its lobby and you'd swear the electricity was off. The only light was one behind the front desk. But the clientele like it that way. The biggest hashish and coke deals in the world are struck in the Ritz's black alcoves, where the principals can't be seen.

There was no doorman, no concierge, no desk clerk for that matter. I wandered around the hotel, starting to feel as if this meeting wasn't going to happen. Just as I was getting ready to head back to Balabakk, a young man materialized out of the dark in front of my eyes: bespoke silk suit, no tie, a shirt that had Harvie & Hudson written all over it. His slight bone structure and dark skin told me he was from one of the Arab Gulf states. He quietly introduced himself as the nephew of “the sheikh.”

“Would you follow me, please?” he asked softly.

“The sheikh?” I asked. We were feeling our way down a darkened corridor. I'd seen the prince only once in a twelve-year-old photo, and I still had no idea which Kuwaiti prince he was. There are tens of thousands of them, and Kuwait was never my strong suit.

“Prince Sabah Al Sabah,” my guide told me in an even quieter voice, “the grandson of the Amir of Kuwait.” My guide rattled off about thirty names, taking me all the way back to the Prophet. He was halfway there when I conjured up his post-Peshawar bio: Miserable student at Sandhurst. Drinking, gambling, wenching in London. Made it through thanks only to the low bar set for Gulf royalty. I remembered that he'd found his way to Lebanon to fight with the Palestinians but ended up an opium addict. He'd almost died after a liposuction operation at a fat farm in Marbella. Great, I thought, a day with a dope-head tub of lard.

My guide glided to a stop in front of a door at the far end of a second-floor hallway, knocked once, then motioned me through and closed the door and himself behind me. Even by the low light, I could see that I'd imagined the wrong Kuwaiti prince entirely. The one sitting on the floor, with his elbow on the sofa, reading, was trim, an athlete—little changed from the photo. Then I finally remembered the right Sabah Al Sabah: another grandson of the Amir, except this one graduated Sandhurst in the top five and was a star on the polo team. A runner, too. I'd read somewhere he'd finished in the top ten in the Marine Marathon in Washington, D.C., only a couple years before under some other name.

As soon as the prince saw me, he jumped up and walked over to shake my hand. He was wearing a cotton crew-neck sweater, neatly starched khaki pants, and American loafers.

“Thank you for coming to Shtawrah.” He pointed me toward the sofa he'd been leaning on. “I feel safe only in the places where I know what the politics are.”

He didn't have to say anything more: Syria controlled Shtawrah and the Biqa' with an iron fist. For the moment, the prince's politics coincided with the Syrians', and that was all the protection he needed.

As the prince took a chair, the rest of the story came back to me. He'd come to Lebanon immediately after graduation from Sandhurst to fight with the Palestinians. Except, unlike most princes, he really did. I'd seen news footage of him running across a Beirut street, firing a Kalashnikov at a Christian position. I wondered now if Nabil hadn't been just out of camera's range. There'd been a nasty fight with the Amir, his grandfather—something about trying to raise money from the Kuwaiti royals for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, followed by a self-imposed exile in the Biqa'. A voice in my head whispered,
British wife, scholar, a book on the Israeli lobby in the U.S.
I didn't trust the last part, necessarily. My synapses were starting to short-circuit. In any event, he was too poised and thoughtful to square with his reputation.

He seemed to be waiting for me to clear my memory banks before he began.

“I'm delighted the Americans have finally come to talk with me,” he said, satisfied at last that he had my attention. “I thought I was going to have to surrender like the Germans and the Japanese before you would listen to my story.”

It sounded to me as if Nabil had figured out I was CIA and not a journalist. It didn't surprise me, and I didn't see any point in setting the prince straight.

“No surrender needed here,” I said.

“Tell me, why did the U.S. stand by bin Laden for so long?”

I figured he was referring to the phantom bin Laden–U.S. connection. I'd heard about it plenty of times from plenty of Arabs.

“We didn't exactly,” I said. “He shows up in Peshawar, offering money and recruits to the Afghans. We were in no position to turn down help, so we left him alone. A sin of omission, not commission.”

The prince shook his head. “Remember, I was there. I saw with my own eyes the planes coming in from all over the Middle East, believers and guns. Americans were on the tarmac receiving them.”

“What does that have to do with bin Laden? I don't recall we gave him any weapons.”

“I'm not talking about weapons. This war was fought and won thanks to a green light from the United States. Bin Laden was allowed to stay in Peshawar because of you.”

Good point.

“Bin Laden can't keep a secret, you know,” he said, rising and taking the seat directly opposite mine. “That's what you came to talk to me about, isn't it? Nabil said you were interested in his American connection.”

“That and a couple other things,” I said.

“It's always been a subject of curiosity for me, your relations with Saudi Arabia. I'm not casting blame, mind you. There was a time you had no choice but to support bin Laden and the extremists in Saudi Arabia. Anyone could see that. The Iranian revolution threatened to consume the Arab side of the Gulf, chaos would follow, and they'd get their great Shia crescent. The United States had to give the Saudis a backbone, a jihad to avert the people's eyes from their weakness, so you gave them the Afghan war, and it worked brilliantly. The Shia uprising fizzled. Balance was restored. But now the Middle East is out of kilter again. The Sunni believers think they have the upper hand. They are convinced that they can restore the Khalifate,
truly
convinced. But that's not what you came to hear.”

“I'm hoping you remember this day,” I said as I pulled the Peshawar photo out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“The way we were. My good friend Sheikh Osama,” the prince said, pointing to bin Laden in the middle. “And there's Nabil and that Iranian. I never knew his name. I don't think I ever talked to him, more than a word or two. And here's…the American,” the prince said, pointing at the headless man in the salwar chemise.

Two sources over time and space; I was starting to believe he really was American.

“Why were you there?” I asked.

“I was seeing bin Laden that morning. There were several of us. It was strange to see an American there.”

“Go on,” I said.

“He spoke beautiful Arabic, with no accent. Later I asked bin Laden about him. ‘An American,' he said, ‘he's the price of admission.'”

“‘The price of admission'? That doesn't make any sense,” I said.

“I asked bin Laden what he meant by that. He only smiled. I immediately thought the American must be CIA. Why else would bin Laden be so coy? You must know about bin Laden's connections with the CIA. Surely it's common knowledge at Langley.”

“Some things are off the books,” I said. I was starting to suspect I was more right than I knew. Officially, at least, the CIA had never met bin Laden. I personally knew every case officer serving in Pakistan in those days. I was in and out of Peshawar when bin Laden was there. If anyone had ever met him, I would have heard.

“I'm sure he was CIA.” There was a defensive edge to the prince's voice.

“What was his name?” I asked, humoring him more than anything.

“Oscar. Ormond. No, maybe Oliver.”

As much as I wasn't convinced a case officer had ever met bin Laden, the name rang a bell. Oliver isn't a common name, at least not in the CIA. But I remembered an Oliver from a long time ago: an Old Boy, there from the start, the OSS. We'd met at some party early on, when I was just a career trainee, spent ten minutes exchanging pleasantries first in Arabic, then Farsi. Mine were still rough on the edges; his, flawless. He'd told me that after Harvard, he spent WWII in Iran with the OSS. He was handling the Qashqa'i tribe. After the war he'd planned to go back to the university and spend his life studying Avestan and Pehlavi texts in a musty library. But the taste of the real Orient put an end to that. He joined the OSS's successor, the CIA, and for the next forty-five years moved from one station to another across the Middle East.

I remembered him putting a bony hand on my shoulder just as our conversation was ending. “You know what I figured out?” he said. “The Arabs don't hold a candle to the Persians when it comes to civilization.”

Oliver had buttonholed me a second time at Langley on his way out the door for good, disgraced by some closed Congressional investigation. It must have been ten years after that first meeting. He had aged decades. His bones seemed to rattle every time he coughed. I could recall his going on about the Babylonian captivity—the seventy years that the Jews dwelled in the Iraqi desert before being freed by Cyrus. He kept insisting that no one could understand modern Judaism without understanding how much influence the Persians and Zoroastrianism had on it. We had to learn to use that. The Persians and Jews united could contain the Arab Bedouin, with their brutal, desert ways, if only we would encourage them. I wondered if he was mad, flipped, his brain fried from too much sun. He would have sat me down for an hour lecture if I hadn't been running off to a meeting. Oliver Wendell Something, like the Justice. Brow like a triumphal arch. Someone would know. It had to be the same guy. How many Americans speak fluent Farsi and Arabic? It would have helped to have a head to go with the body in the photo.

“Did he have a cough?” I asked.

“He did. Hacking.”

That moved me one step closer to the Oliver I knew. But what would the Oliver I knew be doing in Peshawar that day, and, more to the point, with bin Laden? Had he met bin Laden by accident, accompanied him home, and somehow got himself in the picture? It wasn't impossible.

I remembered something else about Oliver: He was fabulously wealthy, rich enough to pay informants out of his own pocket, which meant it was possible not all of his networks were documented. Rich enough, too, to roam all over the Muslim world on a whim. If I had the right Oliver, it's possible he met bin Laden and there was no record of it.

“Forget the old American for right now.” The prince interrupted my thoughts. “You're missing the point. There's someone else you need to concentrate on. The man who took the photo—Khalid Muhammad.”

“You don't mean Khalid Sheikh Muhammad—KSM?”

KSM's popping up in a picture like this is sort of like having an old girlfriend show up at the altar at your wedding.

“KSM?” the prince asked.

“That's how we refer to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We use his initials.”

The prince waved my shorthand away. “Americans and their acronyms. You think you're going to reduce the world and then make sense out of it. Yes, that's who I'm talking about.”

“What was he doing there?”

“In those days he was always by bin Laden's side. He's Baluch. His family is from Iran, though, originally.”

“I thought Pakistan, from near Quetta.”

“No, definitely the other side of the border, the Iranian side. The Kuwaiti government has been watching him ever since he showed up in Peshawar in the mid-eighties. At first we didn't pay any attention to Khalid. He was just another believer who took up arms to fight the communists. Then we started to pick up some hints he was cooperating with the Iranians, with the hard-liners, the Quds Force. It fit with half his family living in Iran.”

The Quds Force was the intelligence arm of the Pasdaran, Mousavi's organization, whose sole mission was to drive the United States out of the Middle East.

“Are you absolutely sure KSM works with the Pasdaran?”

“We watch these people closely,” the prince said. “The Baluch from Iran have always been a problem for us. We never know which way their loyalties blow. The important thing is you understand who Khalid Sheikh Muhammad is. He would have been like any other Baluch in my country, a nuisance, no more, except his father had bigger plans. He encouraged Khalid to go to college in the United States, some agricultural school in the South. Things didn't turn out as the father had hoped, however. Khalid finished the university, came back to Kuwait, and went straight to Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Russians.”

“Everyone was doing it,” I replied.

“There is a twist, though,” the prince went on. “Khalid told his brother he'd been trained by the CIA and was going there under its protection.”

“He was lying. We didn't train anyone in the U.S. to go fight in Afghanistan, just as we didn't run bin Laden.” I was impatient now and needed to know more. “Anyhow, I don't get the connection between the Pasdaran, bin Laden, KSM, and this man who you think is CIA.”

“It confused us, too, at least at first,” the prince said. “It made no sense.”

“Maybe because KSM's a liar,” I said, more to myself than to the prince. “A fantasist.”