CHAPTER 7
Ahmed Badeeb was a genial and roly-poly science teacher at Jeddah’s select Al-Thagr (the Harbor or Haven) school on Mecca Road; one of his pupils was Osama Bin Laden. But Ahmed, who held a master’s degree in secondary education from Indiana State University, moved on from teaching to join Saudi Arabia’s CIA, the General Intelligence Department (GID), or Istikhbarat, and one morning in the spring of 1980, he was called in by his boss, Prince Turki Al-Faisal. A high-ranking Pakistani general was arriving the next day to meet the king and the crown prince, explained Turki, and he wanted Ahmed to make all the arrangements.
Ahmed did not attend the meeting with the crown prince, but he did join his boss afterward for dinner with the visiting general, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, who turned out to be head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence organization, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). The conversation was all about Pakistan’s beleaguered northwestern neighbor, Afghanistan, invaded a few months earlier by the Soviets. Muslim freedom fighters, the mujahideen, local Afghan warriors, were mounting fierce resistance, and Pakistan was supporting them.
Three days later Ahmed received further instructions.
“You have a task to accomplish,” said Prince Turki, handing him an envelope. “His Royal Highness [the crown prince] has agreed to help our Afghan brothers. We are going to buy them their first shipment of weapons, and you must take the money for them to Pakistan—in cash.”
“In cash?” queried Ahmed.
“In cash,” repeated the prince, handing him the crown prince’s letter, where Ahmed read the words “No trace.”
“At the beginning,” explains Prince Turki today, “it was most important that the Russians should not be able to link the mujahideen to any national entity, neither to ourselves nor to Pakistan. We needed deniability. The plan was to use the money to buy Kalashnikovs and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade launchers] for the Afghans, along with other old Russian weapons that the freedom fighters could have picked up from anywhere.”
Ahmed Badeeb went to the bank and quoted an account number. He declines to say how many fresh $100 bills he requested, but he confirms that the sum was in the millions, and that he was able to lift and carry the money in one large carryall. Experienced couriers report that $2 million is the most that a reasonably fit individual can hang from one arm without staggering too obviously under the weight of the bills (nearly forty-one pounds).
“What sort of job do you do, sir?” asked the teller curiously as he checked the account balance.
“I’m a businessman,” replied Ahmed.
Two days later he went back to receive the notes, each million packed in its own custom-made wooden box. Ahmed took the money out of the boxes, wrapped the bundles in metal foil from his kitchen, and enveloped the whole package in a black plastic garbage bag, which he carried as far as Karachi.
“That bag’s too big to carry on the plane,” he was told at the domestic check-in for Islamabad.
“Not at all,” he insisted, cavalierly jiggling the bag up and down, trying to give the impression that it was filled with party balloons.
When the bag went through the X-ray machine, the kitchen foil bounced back a plain image, and when the security guard asked to open the bag, Ahmed told him there was sensitive film beneath the black plastic. Producing his diplomatic passport, he decided that the time had come to ring General Akhtar.
“Your people are giving me a hard time with the documents,” he said.
“You have arrived so quickly!” said the general in surprise—scarcely a week had passed since the dinner.
Badeeb’s destination was the home of Pakistan’s president, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.
“It was a very humble, very simple place,” Ahmed remembers. “A small villa with only three or four rooms. The president was just getting ready for the maghreb [sunset] prayer, and we prayed it together.”
Badeeb had met Zia-ul-Haq the previous year when he carried a message from Saudi Arabia requesting that Pakistan should not hang the deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sentenced to death on corruption charges. That request was not granted, but his current mission met with more success. The Saudi sat with the president late into the night discussing the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Zia’s small son zoomed around the room on a little bicycle.
“I have brought the amount you requested of His Majesty,” said Badeeb.
“Give my thanks to His Highness,” replied Zia. “Please tell him I will come for umrah [small pilgrimage] very soon.”
Meanwhile, in an adjoining room, five generals of the ISI had opened Badeeb’s bag and were toiling away, counting every one of the crisp $100 bills.
Osama Bin Laden could not wait to get to Afghanistan. Within two weeks of the Soviet invasion the twenty-two-year-old was visiting Peshawar, the atmospheric town on the Pakistani side of the border where the bearded mujahideen loped down the streets with their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. Returning to Jeddah inspired, Osama lobbied wealthy friends and relatives to raise what one associate described as a “huge” sum of money to support the mujahideen.
There were not many devout young Muslims who could afford to drop their studies to fly to Pakistan on an impulse, and some historians have doubted whether Bin Laden traveled to Peshawar at such an early date. But there is no evidence to contradict his story. Osama certainly had the funds to take him just about anywhere in the world, and if his personal wealth was exceptional, his impulse was not. The plight of the invaded Afghans woke an immediate and powerful response in a society where outrage was habitually rationed. Here was an injustice where protest could be permitted—encouraged even—by the Saudi government, which had had no diplomatic relations with the atheistic Soviets since 1938.8 Better that anger should be directed into jihad abroad than into Iran-style revolution at home.
With the government’s blessing, the Friday pulpits took up the cause. Newspapers reported Communist atrocities against innocent Muslims—while their columnists ignored the “red lines” that restrained their aggression on other issues. Charities were created. Collection boxes appeared in supermarkets and mosques, and Saudi schoolchildren were encouraged to raise money for the poor Afghans.
“People became very generous with their money,” remembers a government minister of the time. “It was an inspiring and romantic idea that people wanted to help—those few brave men in the mountains resisting the mighty Soviet Union.”
Religion was the catalyst. Early in the 1980s Rafiq Hariri, then CEO of the construction company Saudi Oger, astonished the Washington Post reporter David Ottaway by smuggling him into the Muslim-only area of Medina, where he proudly showed off the massive Koran printing plant he had been commissioned to build for the government. It was by far the world’s largest. Hundreds of machines stood ready to churn out tens of millions of Korans in multiple languages with commentaries approved by Bin Baz and the Saudi ulema. It was part of the Kingdom’s worldwide missionary effort to combat the Shia teachings of Khomeini’s Iran, and particularly in Afghanistan, where it would ensure that young Afghans were fortified against Marxism with “the true Islam.” Korans and textbooks would be distributed free to the madrasas (schools) inside Afghanistan and along the Pakistani border.
Less than six months after the Soviet invasion, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al-Faisal, the elder brother of Turki, announced that fund-raising among ordinary Saudi citizens had accumulated no less than 81.3 million Saudi riyals ($22.1 million). In May 1980, Saud handed a check for that amount to the secretary general of the Islamic Conference in Islamabad. The money was destined for Afghan refugee relief. But by that date his brother Turki’s General Intelligence Department had already secretly disbursed a great deal more than that—on weapons.
Since taking charge of Saudi foreign intelligence in 1977, Prince Turki had doled out large sums of money for the fighting of covert wars. In the mid- 1970s, Saudi Arabia had become a founding member of the Safari Club, the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mus tachioed chief of France’s CIA, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage), suppliers of the CS gas that finally ended the Mecca siege. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postco lonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s father, King Faisal, with a proposition.
“His idea was,” recalls the prince, “that since our American friends were off the playing field, as it were, and could not launch undercover operations at this critical time, we should get together a group of like-minded countries to try and keep the Communists out of Africa with money, arms, soldiers—any sort of skullduggery. Calling it the ‘Safari Club’ was a sort of joke by Marenches, but the aim was deadly serious.”
The French spymaster had it all worked out. His SDECE would supply the technical equipment and expertise; Morocco and Egypt would supply arms and soldiers; Saudi Arabia would supply the money. Marenches also invited the Shah to join—which led to the premature revelation of the club’s activities when the Iranian leader fled from Tehran in 1979 without destroying his papers. By then, however, the Safari Club already had an impressive list of achievements to its credit. In March 1977 Moroccan troops (paid and armed by the Saudis) had fought off a Cuban-Angolan attack intended to oust Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire; Somali president Mohammed Siad Barre had been bribed out of the Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for again by Saudi Arabia); and Saudi money had enabled both Chad and Sudan to keep Libya’s Muammar Al-Qadhafi at bay.
“We did it for America,” remembers Prince Turki, “but we also did it, obviously, for ourselves. From the earliest days Saudi Arabia had always looked on Marxism as anathema to human well-being, and also to religion. We saw it as our job to fight against Soviet atheism wherever it might threaten.”
Now Marxist ideology and Russian arms were threatening Afghanistan—and the whole Gulf region. Zia-ul-Haq had a dramatic-looking red triangle that he would place on the map of Afghanistan to show how the Soviets were seeking to drive a wedge through the region to push south and achieve the historic Russian goal of a warm-water port. The Pakistani president got out his triangle for the benefit of William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s newly appointed head of the CIA, when he arrived in Islamabad in 1981, but Casey had no need of the lesson. Jimmy Carter, the outgoing president, had laid down U.S. policy a year earlier in his State of the Union address, a few weeks after Russian tanks had rolled into Afghanistan: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Early in February 1980 Carter agreed to a covert program that would put his doctrine into practice—a secret agreement that Saudi Arabia and the United States would match each other, dollar for dollar, to fund an undercover guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan that would hand the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” The two countries would eventually spend more than $3 billion each, according to Rachel Bronson, an authority on U.S.-Saudi relations, in a collaboration that would turn out to be world-changing. It was a partnership that could hardly have been imagined half a century earlier, when America and Saudi Arabia, so remote and so dramatically different from each other, had first drifted into contact.