Shtawrah, Lebanon
Sitting astride the Beirut-Damascus 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 amp;C 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 hardliners, 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."
"Remember, I know Khalid," he replied.
The prince recounted how he'd first run into KSM at the Intercon Hotel in Peshawar. They'd struck up enough of a relationship for him to see that KSM always seemed to have money-odd because his family was poor. KSM and the prince became close. KSM eventually told him that he'd been approached when he was at school in North Carolina by an elderly gentleman who spoke fluent Arabic and had come there to recruit "consultants on the Middle East." The offer seemed innocuous enough and KSM accepted. When he graduated, the man bought him a ticket to Peshawar. Every two months, he would appear himself, pass KSM an envelope stuffed with cash, and debrief him on the war in Afghanistan.
"Don't tell me this is the old man in the picture, the one with his head cut out? The one you think is CIA and is called Oliver?" I asked, still not ready to believe any of our officers had ever met bin Laden, let alone KSM.
"This is what I've been trying to tell you. The old man in the picture was a CIA agent, Khalid's case officer."
The story was getting more improbable by the moment. KSM one of ours, an informant? This was going to take a while to sink in.
"Are you sure you don't know who the Iranian was?" I asked, still trying to piece this all together.
The prince shook his head.
"It's important. There's this Pasdaran colonel I've been tracking for years. If they're one and the same…"
"Do you know the name of the martyr who drove a truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut? Of course not. Some things will never be known. Don't you think it's enough that a Pasdaran officer is keeping company with a man who once tried to bring down twelve airliners?"
I didn't need to answer. KSM's dreams were clear enough to everyone. In 1994, when he was in Manila, he planned to blow up twelve American airliners over the Pacific. He'd also plotted to assassinate Clinton and the pope. When I first heard about KSM, I thought he was a fraud. He didn't appear
to be capable of executing any of his plans, either back then or now. But it was an entirely different matter if he was really in league with the Pasdaran.
"Khalid found a way to make money." The prince's voice momentarily surprised me. I'd wandered into some other zone.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
The prince told me how the Kuwaitis had pieced together from telephone taps that there was an underside to KSM's plan to blow up twelve airplanes: He was betting on the stock market-options. Several months before the attack was to occur, he'd bought deep-in-the-money puts on airline companies that would have been affected had the attack succeeded. The trades were made through numbered accounts in the Caymans and banks in Puerto Rico.
"I'm sorry, your highness, this all has the markings of someone's fabrication. I've dealt with crap like this for the last twenty-five years. And right now my bullshit detector's in the red zone."
The prince opened up a portmanteau and pulled out a six-inch sheaf of documents.
"These are transcripts of intercepts: Khalid's calls back to his family in Kuwait. They're genuine, believe me. My brother has the actual taped conversations."
"Your brother?"
"He's the adviser to our intelligence service."
You had to love small, tight families like the Al Sabah.
The prince picked out a transcript of one of KSM's calls to a telephone booth in Kuwait City on June 16, 2000. After KSM asks about family and news from Kuwait, he says he's sent "six chips" to Kuwait by courier.
"Six chips?" I asked.
"Prepaid Swiss cell SIM cards to be used by his network for the next operation. We intercepted all six. The amazing thing was that they were all in sequence. Now we're able to intercept most of Khalid's calls."
"Did you tell the CIA station about this?"
"Of course. My brother gave the chips to the station to copy. He also told them about the call options. But there's been no response."
The prince handed me more transcripts. The details were amazing:
KSM's phone calls across the Middle East, and to Germany, Spain, Italy, even the United States. In my twenty-five years with the CIA, I'd never seen better stuff.
"Tell me again what the station said."
"I just told you. Nothing. Not a word."
Unless I was completely misinterpreting the stuff the prince was showing me, this was insane. It was rock-solid intelligence that could be acted on.
The prince picked out another transcript and turned it so I could read it. In this one KSM says:
Do not move until liquids are in place.
"What liquids?" I asked. "Nitrocellulose?"
KSM had been planning to use nitrocellulose to bring down the twelve planes in 1994.
"No. We think it's some other highly volatile substance. Something that could be added to jet fuel. Maybe methyl nitrate."
We both stared at the words, hoping they might somehow translate themselves into something comprehensible.
"Are you sure your brother gave all this to the station?" I asked again.
"He did. And I'm also sure he never heard back. Not even a 'We're looking at it' or 'Please keep investigating.' Gross incompetence? We don't know."
"Can I have these?" I asked.
"That's why I showed them to you," he said. "You have to bring them to someone's attention in Washington who will understand their value. But we haven't talked about the most important thing. Khalid isn't working alone. He has an American partner."
"You don't mean Oliver? He's barely alive in the photo. I'm sure he was dead by 1994."
"No. Another American. We don't have his name."
"How do you know this?"
"Again, Khalid's calls back to his family," the prince said. "He talked about his American partner. But here's the really scary part: Khalid is about to try again."
"Blow up airplanes?"
The prince nodded. "There's no smoking gun yet, but it's the best conclusion we can come up with."
"He wouldn't have discussed this on the telephone," I said.
"We would never have believed it ourselves if we hadn't arrested two Saudis transiting from Iran in October 2000. They confessed they were working for Khalid Sheikh Muhammad."
The prince pulled out another set of documents from his portmanteau-the confessions of the two Saudis.
I skimmed through them. Indeed, both independently confessed they worked for KSM. But what really got my attention was where they both said that a Pasdaran officer had arranged their transit through Iran, including a week's stay in Tehran. They were taken to a camp where Pasdaran explosives experts briefed them on techniques to blow up planes in midair.
I studied the prince's face. If the confessions were genuine, they were a damning piece of evidence, a causus belli against Iran. It was plausible, too. Someone as bloody-minded as bin Laden would never let religious differences get in the way of a tactical alliance with the Pasdaran. We'd even seen evidence of it in 1996 when we found out he had met an Iranian intelligence officer in Jalalabad, a powwow that led to an agreement to conduct joint terrorist attacks. Nothing came of it, but only because Iran's ayatol-lahs stopped sanctioning terrorism shortly afterward. If now the Pasdaran wanted to mount an operation independently from the Iranian government, why couldn't they outsource it to someone like bin Laden, especially to help recruit suicide bombers? No one had a better pipeline to that bottomless pool.
"Is this real?" I asked. "There's nothing about stock options." I was still stunned I was seeing intelligence this good.
"Khalid wouldn't have told them about something like that. The options are a side deal between him and the American. The Iranians and two Saudis care only about slaughtering Americans."
"Are you absolutely sure about the options?"
The prince picked out another half dozen transcripts of KSM's calls. The conversations were elliptical and involved code words, but you could
make the case that KSM was giving instructions to arrange the trades through bawalas-money changers. Airplanes weren't mentioned, but I took the prince's word that they were somewhere in the intercepts.
"Fascinating stuff," I said, "but if our station in Kuwait is not buying it, I'm not sure my carrying the bad news to Washington will make a difference."
"The reason we're sitting here together is not to pass the time. I'm giving you the intercepts to give to your government so it will listen and stop the attack-and the bloodshed that will ensue if Khalid and the Pasdaran succeed. You Americans always get history wrong when Muslims are involved." He was studying me hard as he talked. "Khalid is not Hamas. He's not even a good Muslim. He's a murderer, pure and simple. If he succeeds in doing what we think he will try to do, he will hurt our cause. You'll blame Muslims in general. The Jews will play you the way they always do, make you blame their enemies-the Arabs-and not yours."
I felt as if his eyes were burning a hole somewhere in the back of my brain.
"You don't think I know all that?" I asked. "I'll try."
The prince grabbed the transcripts from me and looked through them until he came to the one he wanted. It was a New York City area code and telephone number.
"New York?" I asked.
He nodded. "This is fresh information not passed to the station in Kuwait. This number should help you. It belongs to one of Ramzi Yousef's contacts who was in on the World Trade Center. He was living in Queens then.
"Here's a second number," he said, showing me another page of the transcripts.
I recognized the country and city code: Tehran.
"Khalid's contact number. Maybe this will convince the U.S. this is serious."
"Where's KSM calling from?"
"Usually Karachi. But in this instance… well, look for yourself."
The transcript the prince handed me was dated February 16, 2001-a call from KSM to a phone booth in Kuwait City. At one point in the handwritten transcript KSM says, "I'm in the country of the 'Aja'im"-a common term for Iranians.
"The number Khalid is calling from is a main Pasdaran number. You should have a record of it. But before you do anything, you need to see my brother. He's coming to Lebanon next week and will bring more intercepts."
"The more stuff he brings, the better."
"I understand. There's something else he will tell you about: Khalid's American partner owns a company in Maine called BT Trading."